From: Rainer To: darrinm@synopsys.com Subject: A journal of our trip so far Date: Fri, 25 Sep 1998 04:41:52 EDT Monday-Tuesday 9/21-22/98 This entry is a recollection several days later -- not on the days indicated above, but rather about those days. It all started so well. It just didn't stay that way. I got the web page started very early Monday morning (getting very little sleep was supposed to help with the time change). We woke up on time. And then things started going awry. Monika's ride to school didn't show up because they were celebrating the Jewish New Year (and forgot to tell us). So I drove her to school. The dog got in the car okay -- he's always excited about going to the doggy hotel. The cat hid under the middle of the bed and couldn't be coaxed out. It was a good thing to have had her front claws removed. The van needed gas, especially since I wanted to get my last allergy shot. Dropped the animals off without further incident and got my shot. There was a message to call home -- turned out the spare battery for the laptop had arrived -- so off to Eagle without a badge to get the battery. Then I dropped off the videos. It was after 11 when I got home and I needed to finish packing. Dietrich arrived early to take us to the airport. That was nice. As we were walking out the door, we realized that Monika's jacket must have been left at the Farm on Thursday since we couldn't find it anywhere. Okay, we'll have to buy a jacket for her in Europe. Already the shopping list has started and we're barely out of the door. The new, big-wheeled luggage works fine, although the four carry-ons are a bit more than originally in the plan. The 3 bottles of home brew and some of the other presents for the few people we're going to visit have to come. Hopefully, we'll lose stuff as we go and thereby lighten the load. Right. We'd already talked about sending a care package home from Europe if/when we start acquiring trinkets. Better to ship stuff back and to lug it all around. We get in the car. Do you have the tickets? Do you have the passports? Are we forgetting anything? We get to PDX in plenty of time. The line is non-existant at United. But the plane has been delayed. Only 30 minutes. But the connection to Air France in SFO comes up -- will there be enough time? The United person thinks so. So we have a lunch at the Red Lion restaurant and still have an hour to kill. The flight's delayed another 30 minutes. Oh oh. The shuttle finally arrives, it's packed, people are asked to check their carry ons to help make room. With the scramble to get everyone to plane (why don't they say that, they say de-plane?), we sneak aboard with our extra stuff in tow. The minutes tick by and we haven't left the jetway yet. We finally take off and all seems okay again. We'll make it. We're probably still over Oregon when I suddenly realize that I forgot to pack the serial cable that hooks my digital camera to the laptop. And tte AC adapter. Shit. My heart sinks. We get to SFO around 5:45. Air France leaves at 6:30. Naturally, the United shuttle lands as far away as possible from the international terminal. We hoof it since there are no courtesy carts to ferry late arrivals. The double security check for the international wing first makes us give up the airport-ownded luggage cart -- it may have a bomb in it -- then hassels us about not having Air France boarding passes -- I hope like mad that they don't make us go to the Air France counter -- he lets us pass. Then the second security checker insists on going through every single one of the fifty compartments in Vera's special day travel bag. What did they see in the radar machine that made it so suspicious? Or do they know we're already late? We arrive at the gate, I'm all sweaty from carrying my two carry ons plus Monika's ("It's too heavy for me, Dad"). There's only Air France people there -- great, the flight must be empty? Wrong, the flight's full, they've released our seats, and there's nothing left together. The agent confirms that the luggage won't make it. I want to stay in SFO and leave tomorrow. So does Monika. Vera wants to go now. The French agent hassles with us. There's tears. There's yelling. At least find two seats together, otherwise we won't go. So the row we'd planned on occupying is gone. Vera and Monika get two seats together in the middle section, I get a middle seat between two women several rows behind my family. Shit. This isn't how it's supposed to be. The lady in the window seat turns out to work for Pacific Bell. She talks to herself and tries in vain to engage me in a conversation. I'm pissed. I don't want to talk to anyone. She's worked with Scott what's-his-name, the guy that does Dilbert. She's in NCS. What do I do? Have I been to Paris before? 5 weeks? That's great. I must be really happy. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Shut up, will you? The lady in the aisle seat is retired and going to Vienna. Luckily, she's quiet. The flight drones on. Vera keeps looking back at me. She says we can switch seats after a while. After dinner I say. Dinner is okay. Better than on domestic flights. The beer list sucks so I drink the cabernet. The Vienna lady drinks two bottles of white and later a bottle of champagne. The NCS lady drinks orange juice and fiddles with her stuff incessantly -- arranging, rearranging, blowing up her pillow, trying out the blinders, blah, blah, blah to herself now. Sorry I'm such a grump, I offer, but I'm not in a very good mood. Maybe after another bottle of wine or two. People start to fall asleep -- it was practically dark when we left SFO. I can't switch seats now without waking up the Vienna lady. "Later," I mouth to Vera several rows up ahead of me -- bulkhead row, even. Suddenly, the retired Viennese gets up and heads to the bathroom. All of a sudden she falls down and is laying in the aisle. Attendants flock two or three deep from each end of the aisle. The lady rolls over on the floor and pukes underneath her seat. This is great. I'm feeling a lot better now. There's a couple of movies. I don't remember them at all. The flight attendants make everyone close the window shades. They don't want anyone to see the sunrise. The clock creeps. I switch seats with Vera for a while, play hangman with Monika, she dozes off. Bulk head seats give you knee room, but no place to put your feet. I really don't care to remember much more about the flight. This just wasn't the way things were supposed to be. Charles De Gaulle airport is one of the busiest airports in Europe. The two passport agents they have working there to admit the 322 people from Air France flight 83 are very busy. I decided that this was really a feature designed to keep you from having to wait for your baggage to come out on the conveyor belt. We figured we should not take the agent's word in SFO that our baggage didn't make it. That means we have to wait until no more baggage comes out at all. There are other people still waiting for their luggage, and the line for filing the report for lost luggage is getting longer. So I go off to file the report while Monika and Vera watch, just in case. The lost-luggage agent speaks pretty good English, which is good, because I speak pretty lousy French. She looks the bar code numbers up in the computer and can't find them. Oh well, they should be on the same flight tomorrow and they should be at the hotel tomorrow night. Hotel Esmeralda, she asks? She can't find the hotel guide. Do I know the phone number? No, I don't. But Vera has it written down, with an address, too. The lost-luggage agent gives me a blue and a pink colored survival kit. That was nice. They contain tooth paste, comb, brush, gender-specific lotions and colognes, and Air France T shirt, and, of course, condoms. This is Paris, isn't it? It's 2pm local time. It's 3am Portland time. Monika's starting to fade after the 10 hour, near sleepless, flight. Since things hadn't gone the way we planned, we decided to treat ourselves to a taxi rather than messing with the RER (rapide something-or-other that connects with le Metro). There was no line for getting a cab. The oriental driver spoke virtually no English. Luckily Vera had studied in detail where the hidden Hotel Esmeralda was. So off we drove towards Notre Dame. Monika fell asleep part way to the hotel. The driver, with Vera's help, finally found the hotel tucked away in a myriad of one way alleys, parks, and bridges. Yeah. They even had our room ready. Things were looking up. The Esmeralda is, based on one's point of view, quaint and rustic, or crummy. Quaint and rustic are okay. The old buildings and streets that it's a part of make it quaint and rustic. The location is fabulous. And location, location, location -- is important. I've heard that. The Notre Dame and Seine are just outside our windows. A little park on the other side of the cobblestone street (one car wide -- no parking) also has an old church in it. There's little restaurants (Brasseries) just around the corner -- you can see and hear them. Sidewalk tables and chairs are everywhere to be seen. Even the smallest kitchen has at least one table and chair on the sidewalk. A great location. But, when chair legs have no supporting memember, sofa seats hit the ground, there's no soap holder in the shower, there's not even a shower holder except for the person taking the shower, and the toilet is so close to the wall that your knees and head hit when you sit on it, then I think it's closer to crummy. Did I mention that my glasses broke? Did I mention that the phone in the room doesn't have a removable cord so hooking the modem up is out of the question? Ah, who cares. C'est la vie. The weather is terrific -- feels like the 70s. I haven't heard anything about Lewinsky for an entire day. And, I just got off the phone with my trusty friend and neighbor, Chris, who is just on his way to work. He'll stop by the house and pick up the serial cable and the AC adapter and FedEx them in the quickest way possible to the Esmeralda. I figure, at best, they should arrive Thursday. We leave Paris Friday. This is Tuesday. Everyone takes a short nap, and we head off to explore the evirons around the hotel, and a place to eat. We are in Paris. We're even gay. (That's probably not what I should have said -- but you hear it all the time about Pareee). Wednesday, 9/23/98 After a less than great start, things are starting to settle into a fun pace. We are, after all in Paris. The weather is great. The location of the hotel is unparalleled. And, we're still getting long together even after such a horrible start. Tonight we just returned from a typical French dinner -- it's just before 10pm -- our second in this country. Pino Pizza is just a short walk around the corner from the hotel. I'm sitting alone in the hotel room while Vera and Monika walked across the Seine to take time exposures of Notre Dame. I would, too, but I can't blame my staying here on forgetting my camera cables at home -- the digital camera doesn't do time exposures -- a feature that my next digital must have. ... Just got interrupted by Vera who came back to the hotel without Monika to tell me that Monika is having her portrait painted in front of Notre Dame under gaslit streetlights by the local painting talent. Geez, I give them money to go to the bookstore and what to they do? Spend it on a portrait. It does look very good, however. I walked over and took a couple of pictures -- flash -- and watched the majority of the painting. It's now 11pm, Vera went to the bookstore (Shakespeare's Books, just round the corner, and legend has it that it's run by Walt Witman's cousin or nephew). Thursday, 9/24/98 We all seemed to have slept well again. Pounding the pavement makes one tired. The plan was to enjoy a "petit dejuner" on one of the restaurant boats in the Seine -- we saw the advertisement for 50F yesterday. But, the boats were closed. So we found another "salon de the" breakfast nearby. Then, on to the Internet store to hook up the lap top and get email in/out. This was our second visit. Those guys are quite accomodating and reconginzed us right away. We were in and out in just a few minutes. Bought some post cards and hiked along the river to find the Lyon train station. There we validated the Eurorail passes and got 5 different answers and 3 different prices for the train reservations to Holland. The was actually pretty stressful, especially when Vera had to literally push away local kids while she was at the ATM machine -- we're pretty sure she lost a 100F to one of the brats. We took the Metro the the Louvre -- a huge expanse of interconnected, palatial rooms and buildings. It really is quite impressive, but there were lots of folks besides us there. Saw the medieval castle, many naked stone people, La Jaconde, and very dark paintings bigger than a typical 3 bedroom split-level house in Beaverton showing battle scenes between guys with metal helmets, leather straps, big swords, and no other uniforms to speak of (or to see). I don't know how they differentiated the two sides apart, by the strap placement? Of note should be the security guy at the escalator who pulled me aside and inspected the folding walking stick tied to my backpack. I don't know what he thought it was, but he took it out and puzzled over it a bit, then gave it back without saying anything verbally. He had a quizzical look on him though. Les americains! One can spend days in there. But we didn't want to. So after a brief visit to the Louve bookstore where you can buy explanations about all the stuff you saw (and didn't see) in the museum in any language in the modern world (we didn't buy anything), we left and found a place to have bite to eat (in Monika's case, a sip to drink), and then across famous Pont Neuf (don't know where Pont Huit or Pont Dix are). The Louvre is actually within walking distance of the Esmeralda. So we hoofed it back, stopping along the way to visit Sainte Chapelle, named after the patron saint of broken cameras, but not before we quickly dropped into the first Grand Magasin that we've seen here to buy a hair dryer (the converter would have worked, except the 110 plug on our dryer had the different sized prongs, while the converter didn't). Ste. Chapelle is a relatively small cathedral compared to Notre Dame. It costs admission and is located in the middle of the huge Palace of Justice. We had to go through scanners like at the airport just to get in. It was crowded, very warm, there was lots of stained glass (really mostly painted glass -- but a lot of it), and very disappointing when the Sainte made Vera's camera stop working. We also did a slight detour through the "flower market", a misnomer for a plant market, and finally across the Pont St. Michel to the hotel. Vera spotted a camera store in one direction, so we split up, with Monika and me going to the hotel, Vera to the camera shop. It was good to take our shoes off -- only one new blister for me -- an stretch out on the bed. Vera came back in a while, eyes red, with a camera that no one would even look at. She visited three different shops and they told her it would take a month to have it repaired. Aaaaaacck! What next. We started off with three, functioning cameras. Vera's was now out of commission, and mine had 18 pictures left to take before it's full. Decision time. A no-brainer, really. You're not going to travel for weeks in Europe with just a post card collection to show for it. Monika didn't want to share her camera with us every place we went. Good ol' Visa to the rescue. Don't leave home without it. I went out and bought a nice little Minolta, 140mm zoom, auto everything for 1985F. That's not a good cost deal, but considering I found it, got the demo, extra batteries, and hey, a free carrying case, and was back in the hotel in less than 30 minutes -- I'd say that was a bargain. And, when I stopped at the front desk to ask if I could have a second room key, there was the FedEx box with my digital camera cables! Hooray! So we're a fully, photo-functional family again. Well, almost. Vera still needs to read the instruction book tonight. So, while I'm updating all this, Vera and Monika went across to the park to sketch and write. They look very parisienne, sitting there on the park bench, Monika with her new beret, journals and sketch books out -- tres artsie, tres apropos. Dinner today was at Le Royal Jussieu, the royal juicer or something like that. We had steak with salad and Monika had steak with fries. In France, the first part of the menu item is the part that appears the least on your plate. The second part of the menu item appears the most. The food was good. Chewy, but good. All day long we had been talking about taking le Batobus along the Seine (get it, bateau + bus) to see the La Tour Eiffel all lit up at night. Le Batobus ran every hour until 2300. We were still in the restaurant at 2045 paying the check. Vera was convinced we wouldn't make it in time. But we did. It included a 200 meter run for me from le Batobus dock to the le Ticket Booth and back -- but we made it. Unlike our expectations, le Batobus did not make several stops like advertised -- but sailed to the Eiffel tower and then returned -- which was fine for us since that way we didn't have to find the right Metro to get back to the hotel. It did, however, limit the number of night pictures we took from the moving Batobus. Vera crashed as soon as we got back to hotel. Monika and I went around the corner to Shakespeare's cousin's bookstore. I bought a slightly thicker French/English dictionary than Vera's slimmer version, and it still doesn't have the words like Jussieu in it. But for 10F it was a bargain. And Walt Whitman's nephew put the official book stamp in it. I finally got to download the first 100 pictures tonight. Unfortunately, my script program to generate the html files requires awk, and awk craps out after 10 open files. So clever me converted the awk script to perl, which craps out after just 16 files. Better, but not nearly good enough. Stupid PC. It's too late to work around that problem, so Monika and I just looked at the pictures one by one rather than with my preferred viewer. I still have to flip many pictures 90 degrees -- too bad the dowloader doesn't sense that. So all of the tall pictures -- and there are a lot -- we looked at sideways for now. But, it means that soon I'll be able to put something on the net. Yeah. And more importantly, I can clear out the camera and start over. to be continued.....