The Last Meal

This is a picture of our breakfast on the day we left Paris. That thing you see through the trees in the distance ... that's the Eiffel Tower. We had coffee, orange juice and croissants in front of the Eiffel Tower; 24 hours later I was driving to work in Calgary in a freaking snowstorm. But instead of complaining, I'll tell you about the rest of our trip.

This is technically our last 36 hours. It started in Bruges. We called for a taxi from our hotel. We waited for 10 minutes. No, wait. That's what they told us we'd wait. We waited for 45 minutes. So we were later than expected arriving to the train station. Went to the ticket counter and the horrible, haggard, hairy woman behind the counter scoffed at us and told us we'd missed our train; which was pretty big news to us, especially the part where she said our train actually leaves from Brussels. BRUSSELS!? The city?! Basically, we were supposed to know we had to catch a train from Bruges to Brussels, and catch the 12:35 train from there to Paris. Nice of them to let us know. So the old lady said we should just get on a train for Brussels, which we did ... in a panic. So we jumped off at Central Station, ran to the Thalys counter and explained our ordeal. The next train to Paris left in 6 minutes. It's a big station. The guy told us we should go talk to the Thalys manager and maybe we could get a discount on rebuying our tickets, but we'd probably have to pay full price, which would've been about $200 (not to mention, if we missed this train, we'd be about five hours later arriving in Paris, and we were meeting people). So we ran to the next Thalys counter, which we thought was the manager, who told us to head to the platform and talk to the actual train manager. So we sprinted up the escalator, found a guy who looked like an engineer, explained our situation and prayed. He looked at us, understandably, like we were English-speaking idiots. And let us on his train for free. We jumped on and had to stand in the bar, since we didn't have seats. The most relieving, uncomfortable train ride of my life.

We were so, so, so happy to get back to Paris. Because we really, really, really like Paris. We'd planned to meet an old friend (technically my sister's good friend) and her husband who live there. We dropped our stuff off at their apartment and just walked around. I think of all the pictures we took, the streets of Paris are my favorite thing to look at.

Of course, we hung out at this thing:

As cheesy as it sounds, relaxing in front of the Eiffel Tower never, ever gets old.

The people of Paris are great. The people of Paris that look like this when they ride their bikes are fantastic:

And that's it. It took me a month and half to blog about this trip, so I'm not sure how I can sum it up nicely ... other than to say I'm incredibly blessed to be married to someone who shares my obsession with seeing the world. Even if it means being poor. I loved this trip and I loved taking it with Carmen. There are no words.

In other news, welcome to the new blog. It's meant to match the website, cause we're clever like that. Will I be updating both blogs? Don't know yet. Probably. We've been really, really busy with work and life, so there hasn't been a lot of socialnetworking happening lately. But once we get this all sorted, that'll change.

Thanks for checking.
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