Premiere Classe Cergy Saint Christophe

Gonna catch a train this morning to visit the Versailles Palace.  We opted for a Saturday visit because the water fountain show only runs on weekends, it's pretty cool too!  

 Very historic place; Queen Marie Antoinette was ...

... store and saw an awesome car. we stopped by the virgin megastore and got some things there. after even more walking we had rabbit stew for dinner. it was good ****. finally, we went to sleep to prepare for the drive tomorrow. August 25 we went to mont st. michel which was not fun at all. way to overcrowded, bad bad bad food, and overall not worth it for some dirty old building. After we left the bad place, we went to st. malo ...

... off to see "some" of the exhibits. Got close to the Mona Lisa, and Venus de Milo among others. Too many things to see in an afternoon, but what we did was magnificent, especially the architecture of the buildings themselves.... Back to camp via the supermarket, picnic tea on the rug outside the tents....

... a man in a business suit, riding a bicycle...with velcro straps around his ankles to protect his pantlegs....with no hands on the bicycle because he was using his blackberry!! We have seen bathrooms that the McHenry county Board of Health would have a fit over. We have eaten mussels, guinea hen, veal, beef, pork, rabbit, duck, fish, scallops, and bullots...look tha one up. We almost had intestines and tripe, didn't check the translation properly ...

... Mom and Dad, walked back to the train station and headed for Paris. When we got near to our apt. we noticed lots of riot police in the SWAT gear all over the place. They actually were blocking both ends of our little "alley" of a street. Naturally we had to find out what was going on so followed the sound of someone on a megaphone (?) around the corner from us and saw flags waving and people clapping occasionally, it looked as if they had some ...

... to talk with quite a few people. Jeremy was the common link to everyone and as he explained, there was a "patchwork" of friends in attendance...childhood friends, college classmates and work colleagues (several had worked in NYC but were back in Paris). It was funny when someone would ask me how long I've known Jeremy and I had to say, "Seven hours, and we met on the train this afternoon." Hilarious! It was so nice to be included. Most of the time everyone spoke French, but ...

... in World War I and World War II, I came to realize how many man were lost...for nothing. It makes me so angry and upset to think about all of it. 2. History is alive here in France like a living and breathing being. Just last week there was an article in the NY Times about Sarkozy's new book. Did anyone see it? Levy, the author, hinted that Sarkozy has no memory, referring to the Vichy years. France is going to take a fascinating ...

... his life without restrictions, without selling out to what he believed was a corrupt system, and being independent minded. So many of the "liberal" beliefs that I and others would spend an afternoon talking about in a café were the exact same as this man's. The difference is that he had had enough of just talking about the problems while living in the system that created them, so he just left. It's a shame that our world, our political, economical, and moral world ...

... evolution exhibit. it wasnt very convincing. we also went through their dragon exhibit which was interesting, but failed to make the connections between dinosaurs and dragons which has in the past been described as the same thing by aristotle and others. we enjoyed it anyway. after that anna and I went to mcdonalds which was across the street and had a coke ...

... opportunity to meet their son Laurent and two of his boys, Charles and Timothee, but hopefully by the end of the semester I'll have met the whole brood. Kate and I share a bathroom, but we each have our own bedroom, plus our own common room inbetween. It's actually an unused bedroom, but we've appropriated it as such anyway. It just sounds more classy, no? The apartment is actually the entire fourth floor of the building, which is very nice in ...