Day 8: We begin chapter 2 – England!

Today we bid a sad au revior to Paris! We have come to think of the 7th arrondissmente as our French home and were sad to say “Bon jour” to the cute girl at the boulangerie for the last time. We slept in and spent the morning packing and tidying up. One of the down sides to having an apartment is that there is no daily maid service: you make the mess, you clean it up. So that’s what we did. We were surprised to see how much stuff we had accumulated and realized that with seven more weeks to go, the chances of getting our cases zipped on the 19th of August is pretty slim! We’ll have to see about packing up a box or two to send back before heading home.

[Departing thoughts on Paris: I really love this city – far more than I expected to. The French people are not nearly as rude as we had been led to believe; if you make even the smallest effort to speak their language, they are very happy to meet you more than half-way. Frank had a very entertaining conversation with the cab driver today about the psychosis of motorcycle riders in Paris. Not bad for a cabbie with no English and a Scotsman who hasn’t taken French for 20 years! ]

We got a taxi to the train station way earlier than we needed to but it was nice to have plenty of time to wait in line. Even though we bought our train tickets on-line, the self-service machines were not working so we still had to join the lengthy queue to pick up our tickets. Then we waited. Finally, we boarded the 3:19 Eurostar train from Paris Nord to London Waterloo. The train was very comfy and we were able to spread out around our little table with our mini-picnic (all the food that was left in the fridge when we left the apartment: two beers, two yogurts, carrot sticks, pretzels, cherries, grapes and chocolate cookies!) and play cards, Nintendos and do sudoku puzzles.
At 4:54 London time, we arrived and headed for another queue – this time for an English taxi. Come to find out that there are lots of streets near our hotel closed because of a few car bombs and investigations of other terrorist activity (!?!) so during rush hour on a Friday night in London, we took the loooong way round from Waterloo station to Edgware road but made it eventually. For this part of the trip, we caved into good prices on line and booked in at the London Hilton Metropole. I have to say that it was nice to get here and know exactly what we’d be getting! The kids are splashing around in the pool as we speak and I’ll be able to hit the treadmill tomorrow morning! (I didn’t get to do any running in Paris because it was either too cold, too windy, too rainy or all three! I only brought warm weather running gear!)

We did wander around the neighborhood for a while looking for somewhere convenient to have a pint and some fish and chips. We found a place a few blocks down from the hotel but it didn’t take long for us to notice how ethnic the area had become. (Maybe the angry young men at the table behind us arguing in Arabic was a clue….) We did enjoy our supper (Gillian was thrilled to get some steak pie but Duncan didn’t think too much of the English pub version of lasagne) and then explored the area a bit further to find that the area we remembered isn’t gone, it’s just moved off the main road a few blocks.

So we’ll do some strategizing to see how to spend our two days as a family before Frank and the kids invade Hamley’s on Monday while I’m at the Bank of England. Already on the list: the Victoria and Albert, a return to the British Museum, some theatre (possibly Lion King) and on Sunday Orchestral Mass with the City of London Sinfonia at St. Paul’s Cathedral, a proper Sunday roast (maybe Simpsons on the Strand?) and shopping on Oxford Street. We’re toying with the idea of trying to stop by Wimbeldon tomorrow but we’ll have to see how the weather holds out.

/san/

[FYI: only 12,337 steps today (about 6 miles) since we spent so much time sitting in stations, trains and taxis.]