Day 1: Cincinnati, Paris and Berlin
I was frazzled with work by the time I got to the Cincinnati airport at 5:30 for my 7:00 pm flight. I was ready for a vacation.

The flight was very uneventful. A hottie from California sat beside me and with the help of 2 Tylenol PM tablets, I slept like a baby for 4 hours.

On the bus from the airplane to the terminal, I heard an American woman complaining loudly, acing very dumb and arrogant.

"This weather seems awfully cold. Much colder than I thought. Does anyone know if this is normal? Is anyone FROM here who can tell me if it is so normal to be so COLD?"

This information was readily available in ANY travel book, or by looking in a paper or even on this new thing we call the "Internet."

After being waved through customs, I took a train to Gare du Nord.



HOW TO SPEND $77 in 3.5 HOURS, IN PARIS

I really wanted to go up the Eiffel tower. To this day I never have. I only had a total of 3.5 hours until my flight to Berlin and I wanted to give myself plenty of time in the off chance that I were to find that trains didn't run as often as I would have liked or if I had, by some chance, taken the wrong train. (I have a lot of pride and like many men, I hate asking for directions. The one exception is asking the destination of a train if I'm not 100% confident. I've learned this from experience.)

€ 16,00 – Train: roundtrip tickets from Charles de Gaulle to Gare du Nord (train station)
€ 10,00 – Taxi: Train station to Eiffel tower
€ 10,00 – Taxi: Eiffel tower to train station
€ 4,00 – Locker: to store my computer bag so I could enjoy a nice stroll
€ 6,70 – Beer in Airport. This is perhaps the most expensive beer I've ever bought in my life ($8.70 in USD.)
€ 8,00 – Lunch: Delicious tuna sandwich in a fresh bagette
€ 5,00 – Cigarettes (I puff one or two per day, with beer.)

EIFFEL TOWER

The talkative taxi driver, a Frenchman, dropped me off in front of the Eiffel Tower, making some comment how unfortunate it was that I didn't have an umbrella. Tell me about it buddy.

It was cold and damp. Even with my thick wool jacket, the rain felt cold and up pulled the hood over my head.



The monument was breathtaking, however, a bit smaller than I remembered it when I had last been to that point in 1994, when I was a student in France.

There was a festival going on that was allowing organic farmers from all over France to display and sell typical food items from the region. There were a lot of young people from these booths who were obviously drinking wine, despite the hour.



Many of the late twenties guys were wearing extremely stupid looking hats with the name of their region on them.

I wanted so much to buy Jason and me each a stupid looking hats but, search as I did, I never came upon an opportunity to buy any.

I had only about an hour to walk the damp streets before having to take the taxi and train back to the airport.



IMPRESSIONS OF PARIS

- New chains which I don't remember seeing last time I was in Paris: Starucks, Subway and Office Depot
- I thought the NY subway system was complex in a way that you could not figure our. Paris subway system is 10 times worse. To make things extra challenging for tourists, system maps are posted sparingly and some are presented in slightly different way, so you're not completely sure what you are looking at.
- The Paris subway system is not set up in a nice way for tou rists. For example, there was no stop near the Eiffel tower. This is a defect in the system.



ARRIVAL IN BERLIN

The flight to Berlin was pretty easy as was the taxi ride to Nazarethkirchstraße, where I met up with Evelyn, the woman who owns the apartment where I am staying.

She's a friendly woman, an organized and tidy woman. She gave me a detailed tour of the place first explaining how to lock doors, etc then going into the final points explaining where the silverware and honey were, for example. I felt very at home in the large oversized place. The apartment is in Wedding. Because this area only had street fighting, it was spared much of the bombing, which explains why a 100 year old structure is still standing.

She had a friend, Lydia, who was visiting and offered me tea. We sat and talked for an hour or so. Fortunately, my German held up. I'm being a bit modest. They said they were taken aback by my knowledge of the language, calling it "perfect." It's not perfect, but I'll quietly take the compliment. (Note: If I could spend just 3-6 months here, I could perfect the language. It might be interesting to do a sabbatical from work…)

DINNER

During the conversation, Evelyn suggested that we all go to the new Chinese food restaurant downstairs for dinner. (Well, I understood get take out which sounded better as I was feeling a bit grungy from being in the same clothes for 30+ hours.)



The food was good; was German inspired, meaning that the chicken in the stirfry was breaded kind of like a schnitzel. I got a couple of beers to go. I bid Evelyn "Gute Nacht" before taking a quick shower and heading into my room where I watched an episode of the Office, before sleeping extremely doundly.
- posted by Matt @ 5:58 AM