Paris

Graeme:
We visited a heap of the Paris sights today. Typical Eiffel tower, Champs Elysees, Arc de Triumph, outside of the Louvre etc. Was good. Paris centre is fairly pretty. As you get out in the suburbs the graffiti and rubbish skyrocket. I suppose that's typical of most cities.

Auxiliary battery in the car has definitely failed. Last two nights, the low voltage alarm has gone off, leaving the fridge also unable to run. It's one of those 'maintenance free' batteries so I can't top it up, but the indicator window says everything is OK. I figure for it to have failed so suddenly it must have had a plate collapse or something. It does read a full charge, and will run everything flawlessly for a while, but it'll go from 90% to 10% instantly. Oh well. It's a bit annoying. We're driving the 1km to the train station to give the aux battery a chance to leech some charge from the good battery and absorb some charge from the alternator.

Having 'attended' French at school, I'm the one sent on all the shopping errands. I was sent in to get UHT milk, tea, and breakfast cereal. I came out with UHT milk, breakfast cereal, box of assorted lollies and bruschetta bread. Cassie went back in to get fresh food which I was not aware was required. It's given me opportunity to write this as I sit in the car, charging every imaginable object whilst the engine is running. One trick we learned last time we had a car without an auxiliary battery, is we'd set the fridge temperature considerably lower a bit before we needed to stop. When we'd stop, we'd set it back up to the normal temperature. Doing so gave us a good few hours of additional run time because the temperature would take a while to rise from the lower temp up to the higher preset. Cassie returned with fresh vegetables amongst other things, one of which looked like a huge green chili. I posed a gentle suggestion that it looked like a chili but Cassie insisted it wa
s a capsicum.

Dinner tonight was Bruschetta, topped with beautiful fresh tomato and green chili... a discovery made one decent mouthful into it. (Cassie: Oops!)

Today we've not found Parisian merchants to be very lovable. We were very polite, talking in French, many bonjour's, SVP's, merci's and au-revoir's but are consistently rewarded with grunts. Maybe they are sick of tourists? But then again, Munich, Prague, Kiev and Brugge merchants seemed more than happy to engage with tourists. We are the constant in this equation, and so far, these mob are sticking out with a bad attitude. It's not a matter of matching preconceptions either. We were very excited to visit Paris and use what little language we had that wasn't Russian. It'd be fair to say that if you got out of the city and into the country, you'd get a totally different feel - this seems the same the world over. (Cassie: It needs to be noted that the girl in the supermarket was lovely to us).

One comical example was a fine specimen at a street cafe:
me: 'Bonjour monsieur'
it: 'Do you want lunch?' (He was speaking English to us and we were trying to do the polite thing and speak in as much French as we could)
me: 'Non monsieur, cafe?' pointing to an unoccupied table in the corner

He grunted as if we had asked for the world. Once we sat down he removed the cutlery, removed the napkins and placemats... wait for it.... removed the table top, revealing a round table. We're simple people. A square table, round table, no table. We're not fussed, obviously he was.

me: 'Un cappachino et un chad chocolat svp'
it: 'So one cappachino and one hot chocolate'
me: 'Oui svp, oh, 'sorry' et un creme brulee svp' (I didn't know what sorry was, but I figured he would)
it: grunt mumble

He delivered our goods, the creme brulee was HUGE. Like a quiche dish, but about half the size. Oh damn it was good though. Cassie reported the worst coffee the whole trip - that's saying something. It did look like yellow dish water, but my hot chocolate was good. Little tip to travelers to Europe - make sure your bank cards have the chips in them. Hardly anyone accepts swipe EFTPOS in Europe. Cassie thankfully has one card with a chip, but our joint ones and my one does not.

The attached picture of the chair is to irritate anyone who was expecting touristy photos around Paris - You'll have to wait.
The second photo is of a girl with a Hello Kitty crash helmet. And her scooter with the handbag hook.