Author: kyle

Hi Everyone! We made it! Long plane ride but went fine. Good seats, plenty of food and even good movies! We are staying in a cute very French Hotel near the center of city. Very prim and proper! Kyle and Sara have been showing us the city and what a city it is! Everything you have heard about Paris is true- good and bad!. Lots of outdoor cafes, everyone smokes and has wine with a very long lunch! French police blare their Hitler sounding sirens constantly. (keeps you on edge)! Saw Eiffel Tower today- very impressive!! Browsing in stores- beautiful clothes( just looking of Course) Also walked into Paris’ oldest church and a Palm Friday mass was being held. they encourage tourists to walk in off the street. It was the most beautiful old church I have ever seen. Going to see Notre Dame tomorrow and a big outdoor market! Hope you are all having a good week. We certainly are!! Chat with you again soon!! Linda

Mom and dad are here! We met them at the airport right on schedule today. It was fun to catch up on the long train ride into town. They were both hanging in there very well through most of the day, even as we forced them to stay up to kill off the jetlag. I think they will definitely sleep good tonight. We got them into their hotel early in the day, and it seems the room is going to work well for them. I think the counter-woman was the first nice Parisian we have met all year! We rode the bus and the metro to/from our apartment to let them have a feel for public transportation (Mom: “I haven’t walked this much in years!”). After a quick tour of our neighborhood and a stop at the Boulanger, Sara then made a great quiche dinner for us all. One bottle of wine later, we had them home in time for curfew. I think tomorrow they will feel much better. We’ll put up pictures right here on the main page soon. Any big picture sets we come up with during the trip, we’ll put in the Photo Album section. Tomorrow we’ll give them their first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower, Arc du Triomphe, and Notre Dame. Check back soon!

Today our fan plan went into action and early returns indicate that it was largely successful. The screaming children were much harder to hear this morning, meaning a longer period of sleeping in. Tomorrow, by a huge turn of luck, I believe the school is not in session. So we should be good until my parents get here. I’m looking forward to opening the windows and letting them hear just how bad it is. It’s really impressive how loud it gets. It can almost shake the window panes. Anyway, this is really sad and, given the state of things, really funny in an evil way. On the tax front, my federal return is in the bag. I need to quickly do the state return and jump on sara’s so we can get everything sent in on time. Hopefully an international postmark is sufficient. I need to call and make sure. Sightseeing starts Thursday and lasts until the end of the month. Tonight is Polly et Moi which didn’t get any good reviews, but will be better than listening to CSPAN tonight. We saw School of Rock a couple of days ago, which was great. It will be hard to follow that one up.

It’s nice to say that this time next month we will be home again. No, in fact, it’s a dream to say that. I cannot wait. We are both in need of some serious rest and relaxation. It’s just not possible to get that here. In our ongoing quest to countdown every major milestone until we get home, we now have only about 10 days remaining in Paris. The rest of our time will be spent in B&Bs where, hopefully, we can get a decent night’s rest. I won’t go into our apartment troubles this week (see below) but man oh man. Give me a break. We actually had a fairly productive day today. To start things off we went to our favorite English language book store and looked around. We then wandered over to the Forum Les Halles in search of either 1) an aspirateur or 2) a fan. Finding nothing under 40 euros, we walked to BHV next to Hotel de Ville and did find a decent fan for 20 euros. I am hoping this will make enough noise to drown out screaming children and crazy old ladies WATERING THE GARDEN AT MIDNIGHT WHEN CERTAIN NEIGHBORS HAVE TO WAKE UP AT 7:30 AM. So, then I grabbed a train out to Orsay to pick up my final paycheck and sign my final paperwork with ISCIO. They gave me more money this month for who know what reason. But we are now hopeful that we can bring home enough money to put down on an apartment. That would be great. We’ll probably have to get something cheaper than the place we had last year, but I think we can get a decent summer deal if we start renting around June 1. Boy, a real, sane apartment. Where we can look in the closet and compare it with the space we live in now. This evening we went to the Louvre where free admission was offered for all those under age 26. This was nice, but one thing about the Louvre is you need to be ready to do battle when you go in there. We got burnt our pretty quick so we only stayed an hour and a half or so. We have now seen most all parts of the museum, which is great. My parents will be here in the morning on Thursday. I hope they are able to get some rest on the plane. I have a feeling they will be pretty out of it when they get here, but hopefully by the weekend they will be in shape. By the way, this is just wonderful.

Being home during the day is allowing me to understand how our apartment rent is so cheap. 8+ hours of screaming school children can not do a lot for property value. Screaming seems to be all they do. It’s about 25 minutes on, 25 minutes off constantly throughout the day. Oh well, gives me some motivation to leave the apartment earlier. I went to the airport today and found the section where I’ll need to meet my parents next week. That place is pretty much chaos so I’m glad I went and checked it out ahead of time. We’ll have to take a bus and then the train into paris. But it’s not terribly confusing if you’ve done it before. Another great Paris trait is the extent to which they will go to completely screw tourists whenever possible. Instead of encouraging out-of-towners to purchase a Carte Orange card for unlimited use of the metro for a set number of days, they have come up with a Paris Visite card that does exactly the same thing but is about 20 euros more expensive. If a lucky tourist is smart enough to figure this out, however, they may futhur be tricked into buying a Carte Orange on the wrong day. A Carte Orange is only good from Monday to Sunday – so if you buy it on a Thursday, you will still pay the same price but it will cease to work on Sunday instead of the next Thursday. Brilliant. Less than a month until we are back in the States. I hope it goes by fast.

Today it was great to sleep in on a weekday for the first time in a long long while. I guess I have a lot more free time than I know what to do with now. The sun is out today so I might take a stroll around the neighborhood. One week until my parents are here! Thirty days until we are back in Oregon! It’s been a long year.

It sure hasn’t set in yet, but it will be nice not having to think about work at ISCIO again. I am exhausted. But glad to be done. :bounce

Thanks also to Ted for signing our Guestbook. That part of our site had been like a Ghost Town for a little while there! It’s always a pick-me-up for us to know that people are coming to the site. We really appreciated the nice message.

Well, whoever said that doing taxes when foreign income is involved would be an easy thing is just an idiot. I have spent the last three days trying to figure out whether to take a credit or deduction, reading 40+ page instruction manuals for each form involved in this process, and converting euros wages to dollar wages for specific dates in the past six months. In the end, I am just going to forget about trying to get money back for the French taxes I’ve paid. It is so complicated that I would probably be working on it through our entire trip in April. So France, this one is for you. Consider it a parting gift. Only I’m the one soon to be parting :=)

Only Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are left to conquer now in my career at ISCIO. It seems like 50 years ago that I first got off the train and found myself not understanding anything about that place and the way they conducted business. How much I have learned. Perhaps I would have been better off turning around and running like a madman in the other direction. This weekend was pretty short and sleepless. The neighbors decided to have a big party last night (but it was okay you see, because they put a note out ahead of time for everyone to read). So this combined with the fact that we lost an hour on the clock change hasn’t helped my sleeping capacity. It’s hard to get past this. Hopefully once I quit my job things will improve. We went to the Marais district yesterday and tried to plan a route to take with my parents. The two major areas we want to see are pretty far apart, so we will have to plan better. Today we went out to La Defense and walked around. That part of Paris feels like the U.S. Everything is modern and gigantic. It was a nice change. Have to do our taxes this week (should have done them this weekend). I think they will be less painful that I had initially thought. I will be able to deduct the French taxes I have already paid, so that should allow me to just about break even for the year and not have to pay much. But still, this is the first year I’m having to pay something in taxes. I miss the refund I had been used to getting with part-time work. If I was 25 I would be able to get the Earned Income Credit, but unfortunately Sara and I both exist in one of the little age loopholes. Well, lots of exciting stuff coming up. Here is to Thursday and never reporting to duty as a French worker ever again. :dance