paris

You know, for a city of eternal grandeur, Paris is pretty nerdy.

For one thing, the French have these magnificent comic books. They're sold in hardback volumes, with fantastic art, all sorts of genres, and you can find them in bookstores, for cripes sakes. It makes me want to learn French just so I can read them. About half-way through my stay I found out there was a French comic shop (bulles de salon) within a few blocks of the apartment, which had a fantastic layout with a round room with featured items on display, and a long back room with older books, some American comics on their own shelf, and little figurines and posters. I got my wife a fantastic poster of a fairy queen in a long dress, which she was ecstatic about.

Well, here I am home again. It's been a lovely trip, all told.

It was nice having an apartment in Paris, and the area we were in was a lot of fun, but the internet was a big disappointment. It wasn't really until Wednesday that we had live internet in the apartment, and even then the wireless router that came with the place wasn't working properly with more than one user. Happily, both Matthew and Al were willing to hook up their laptops to the Ethernet cable and substitute as wireless modems, so it wasn't too bad, but still...

Well, I'm in Paris!

The flight out here was as good as expected - a quick trip on a plane down to Charlotte, a dash from terminal to terminal to catch the Paris flight, and then up, up and away! We even arrived a little early thanks to a tailwind that pushed us on our way. We helped Matthew (a co worker) collect his bags, and then met up with Greggles, another Drupaller who arrived moments after we did, and took a cab from the airport - for four people it was much more pleasant than daring the underground on such little sleep.

This last weekend was really a lot of fun. It's our last weekend here in Denver before we take off for Paris this Saturday, and so there was a fair amount of preparation for that going on.

To start with we headed off to Weight Watchers, which I hadn't been to in a month due to... well, a mix of different reasons, including my trip recently to LA for DrupalCampLA. Happily, it turns out I'd lost another 1.4 lbs, which means I've lost more than fifteen pounds! That, followed with a little breakfast over at the Village Inn (free wifi!) was a beautiful start to the day. We then slipped into Best Buy to look for the new Professor Layton game, coming out this week - I was hoping it might be out early. It wasn't. Ah, well.