Paris – Part One
Paris is beautiful, sprawling, elegant, dirty, busy, loaded with history and covered in graffiti. Everything I like in a city. My french is embarrassingly bad – I felt too ashamed in most instances to attempt to speak it. However, people were very kind and only laughed at us a little while helping us out a lot.
Yup. I’m a tourist.
We took the Eurostar over from the UK, checked into our hotel and then hit the streets in search of a vegetarian restaurant. They do exist in France, promise. We stayed at Mama Shelter, near the Gambetta Metro stop, it’s a terrific hotel and I recommend it highly. Very cool modern interiors (with a black wall!), free Wifi in the rooms, flat screen tv, and high quality complimentary soaps in the bathrooms. The building is made of concrete and our room was the quietest hotel room I’ve ever had. If you’re a light sleeper such as myself, you understand what a blessing this is while traveling.
Click below for more Paris travel porn…
Trip Report – London
We didn’t spend a lot of time in London on this trip, plus I managed to choose a hotel which was both loud (our next door neighbor came home drunk at 3 am and started drunkenly calling everyone he knew and verbally berating them) and expensive. (Not my fault, but still… made for a rough wake up call.)
We did spend a day doing the most touristy thing we could think of – checking out the Tower of London.
In what’s become a tradition, we started the day with a visit to the Tea House, near Leicester Square, so I could stock up on this russian samovar tea I’ve become hopelessly addicted to. Also located in the square is the half off ticket booth for theater and musical tickets, which you should always stop and investigate. Last time we traveled to London we saw ‘The 39 Steps’, which was brilliant, and ‘Spamalot’ because we are unashamed dorks.
The best-named pub in all of London. Possibly.
Click for more below….
“Without you, today’s emotions would be the scurf of yesterday’s”
The title quote is from the film ‘Amelie’, which I felt inspired to watch at three am, the morning after we returned from Paris. Jet lag would not let me sleep any longer.
In the course of investigating the word ‘scurf’, I’m greatly amused that it can be defined as ‘a thin flake of dead epidermis shed from the surface of the skin’. Tres Romantic, no?
Trip report – Cambridge, Uk
Phew. We got back on Thursday and I’m just now starting to feel the jet-lag subside. My partner David and I flew to the UK for a couple of software conferences in Cambridge, then spent a few days in London, followed by Paris! I was looking forward to returning to Cambridge, we visited there three years ago and this time I was going to have a few more days to explore the city.
The first day it rained, but I was undeterred (and had remembered to pack a couple of umbrellas); I headed out for some wandering and shooting in the moody weather.
I stopped for lunch at the Rainbow Cafe, which is located right across from Kings College. Finding vegetarian food isn’t a huge challenge in the UK, most every pub has something (usually a veggie risotto for some reason), but I always try and track down restaurants which are entirely veggie. The food was delicious; I warmed up with soup and some hot tea, and ventured back out.
Heading off to the Uk…
We’re flying out today for ten days in the Uk! The start of the trip is for work, the end will be a bit of much needed vacation. We’ll be in Cambridge, London, and wherever else we decide to investigate. Usually our trips are over scheduled, so this time we decided to take it easy and see how we feel when we get there.
Photos from our last trip across the pond are here on flickr. It’s really hard to believe it was in 2007!
