Thursday, November 13, 2008

Weekend in Paris 6-11 Nov 2008

My boss asked me if I'd go to a meeting for her... well if I have to...in Paris. Yeah! So I added another meeting with my French Govt counterpart on Monday and voila, a weekend in Paris! Billy joined me on the Eurostar, through the Channel Tunnel.

So far so good, but I brought nice clothes and decided I wanted to feel like a Parisian, instead of a gawking tourist, as I have on previous trips.... big mistake! My trendy street shoes were incredibly painful as Billy and I walked ALL over Paris.

Whatever was I thinking??? No one I knew saw me! Why didn't I just wear comfy running shoes!! After abandoning Billy during two days of meetings, I knew we'd want to explore together on the weekend, so I decided to skip running kit.

So my favorite places were the ones where we stopped walking!! Little out of the way restaurants, the Picasso Museum and an eclectic exhibit, "Academia" at l'Ecole des beaux-arts.

Paris is so cool and Parisians know it. Definite advantage in collaborating with the Germans in WWI, they didn't bomb it like the Blitz in London and Napoleon III's architect, Baron Haussmann, demolished most of Paris' medieval narrow streets, replacing them with grand monuments and parks with 12 avenues leading out from the Arc de Triomphe.

We walked from sunrise to sunset - far more than my 30 min requirement on Kelownagirl challenge.

But I was barely shuffling by the time we got back to the Eurostar and I had to take most of the week off running as my feet still ache!

2 comments:

Petraruns said...

I always have this problem when I go to Paris - if I dress for comfort I end up feeling a slob next to the Parisians but if I dress like the parisians my feet end up hurting... Did you try out the bikes?

Drusy said...

We did see the bikes, but skipped it as we did not know where we could turn them back in near our hotel, and it would defeat the benfit if we had to walk back across town to return the bikes! Next time we'll do the research better.