Arrival at 1:30pm, after a grueling, 10 hour flight. I almost never do well on planes, and this time is no exception. I’d met a couple of people on the plane, and we stuck together for a bit working our way through the baggage line, customs, etc, before parting. I took the Ai France bus to Montparnasse, got a couple of photographs of myself for later use on the metro, and then started walking towards the hotel.

I was dead tired, and realized that I should have brought my backpack instead of my duffel, but that wouldn’t have let me use my camera bag. Darn, darn, darn. A lesson for next time. It wouldn’t take 15 minutes to walk to the Sophie Germaine hotel from the train station, but doing that after a long plane and bus ride was nasty. I somehow walked down Daguerre, which was a nice little street filled with restaurants and shops, and then found Sophie Germaine the next street over.

I talked to the person at the desk, and asked for Christina. "She’s still in there." I squeezed into the tiny elevator (no, I wasn’t fat then, and I’m still not particularly fat now, despite all Parisian attempts to the contrary) and went up.

Christina greeted me in her nightgown. "I went to sleep." A shower, dinner at Daguerre (the best French Onion soup in town), and we made arrangements for the next day. A city tour in English in the morning, a visit to the cabaret at night, dinner reservations, and a metro pass for me, since Christina got one, having arrived in the morning. Then a blissful unconsciousness.

Great, it’s 4am, and I’m up and unable to sleep. This is what jet lag means. My last experience with jet lag of this magnitude was when I’d flow to San Francisco from Singapore. Well, Christina seemed unable to sleep, either, so we put on our clothes and walked around outside. They were cleaning the streets in the morning. Water flowing everywhere. Stores were being stocked by trucks. Croissants were what Christina wanted, and as soon as things opened we got some chocolate croissants and sat at a local McDonald’s drinking hot chocolate, hot milk, and munching on the Croissants.

The city tour was non-descript, but it showed us the usual highlights. The Invalids, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Eiffel, the Latin Quarter, all that whizzed by, as and we ended up at the Sacre Coeur at noon. We elected to leave the exceedingly hot van there, and made our way back among the streets. Lunch near the hotel, and then we fell asleep. Jet lag.

We woke up in time for the show but not in time to make it for our dinner reservation. So we cancelled it, went to the Champ Elysees, and had a nice mussel dinner at Leons, and spent time walking down the boulevard. There's something special about walking down this street with a close friend--the crowds certainly do look different from the crowds back home, and then I realize that more than sixty percent of the population are tourists, and nobody's in a hurry to do anything, which is very charming in itself. There are other places like that, but in Banff, the last place I was at which was like that, the entire city was out of place among its surroundings, while Paris fit well within its surrounds. We then went to the Crazy Horse for the show. Christina thought it was very well done, tasteful, almost artistic. I had no previous shows to compare it against. A taxi returned us to the hotel and we fell asleep.

Ok, it’s not jet lag anymore, it’s the bloody garbage trucks running at 5am. Time to get out of Paris. Unfortunately, a train strike had disabled the usual reservation system, so we got on the TGV to Lyon only after lots of random running around. This should have kept us from leaving town, but the third day of sleep deprivation left me quite unable to make a reasonable decision. I slept a little on the fast train, but the countryside we were passing through was quite pretty too, so I got a good look at it.

A mad scramble for a rental car at Lyon (Christina managed to charm one of the rental car guys into letting us have one), and another mad scramble for lodging. We were moody. She’s quite mad at me. When Christina gets mad, she doesn’t scream at me, or function badly. She just lectures me. So I got two long lectures, today, and Thursday. Dinner of Crepes. Very nice. Driving around was a nightmare. 10 years since I drove a stick shift car (and back then I didn’t have a license!), the reverse frustrated me until Christina got a Swiss guy to show us how it worked. Travelling with a cute girl has its advantages.

The hotel was seedy, but we had two rooms and two beds for 180FF. We were to find out why very soon. I went to sleep first. And was awakened by screams at 2am. I jumped out. And she pointed at the bed. Yikes. Bed bugs! "Itchy, itchy, itchy." Gave her the keys to the car and she went down to sleep in it. I couldn’t sleep much after that and neither could she.

We ditched the hotel, and made plans to return to Paris. Then toured the country-side. The country side’s 5 degrees Celsius cooler than the cities. Should have made plans to stay out there instead. Oh well. The French country side is picturesque, reminding me of Scotland. Little towns, not much activities. Rows and rows of tightly packed houses, then farmland, then we could see the Alps. This stick shift is ok. I think I’m getting the hang of it. But boy, you can sure get RSI if you spent too much time shifting and shifting at these traffic circles.

The only bad dinner we ever had was in Lyon, at a lousy Chinese place. Then back to Paris via the TGV. On the TGV, Christina pulls out her teddy bear and goes to sleep with it. A woman sitting across from us stares at her, stares at me, and then stares at her again, then gives up and returns to her book. A one night stay at the Hotel Miramar, a noisy hotel near the train station. But I was too sleep deprived to care. I slept soundly.

A search in the morning for a hotel put us at the Hotel de la Paix, where we stayed for the rest of our vacation. The side facing away from the streets were very quiet, and I was delighted. Now we could have a real vacation. I was finally fully adjusted, and we could explore. First, a visit to the Saint Chapelle chapel. Beautiful stained glass. Then I found that I wasn’t allowed to use my tripod inside. This was something that would haunt the rest of my trip. Next, the Notre Dame. Again, no tripods. A visit to the department store, the Hotel de Ville, where you got a chance to see the kind of fancy appliances and gadgets the French filled their apartments with. Prices were generally very high, though a lot of the stuff was very cute. Christina could probably tell you better about the costs of living in France, given that she was preparing to nest.

Then the Arc de Triomphe at sunset. Again, no tripods anywhere. This was getting annoying. The elevator was broken, so we bought tickets to walk up the stairs to the top. "I can’t keep up with you, so why don’t you go ahead." I slung on my camera bag, put my tripod in one hand, and walked up at an easy pace, passing other Americans who were resting off by the side. A couple of shots here and there. Christina was here. "Did you know that you left a trail of people back there talking about how quickly you went up those steps?" "Really? Hee hee." I took a couple of pictures, and then dealt with a flock of other tourists who wanted their picture taken by someone who looked like a pro. Hey, with a point & shoot, I can’t do any better than the next guy, so I don’t know why anybody bothers asking me. If someone handed me a roll and asked me to just shoot it with my SLR, I might be able to do something.

Christina was to comment afterwards to David on the phone on how I was at the center of attention that day. I guess if you can’t be cute, you can carry a camera bag and tripod. "Poor Christina," I said to David, "she just can’t get used to not being at the center of attention. Hey, does she snore as much when she’s with you?" Embarrassed, Christina grabs the phone back from me. Oh, the mistake of letting a close friend talk to your husband. I once made the mistake of having both Minh and Christina at dinner with me. They didn't show me much mercy then. This was her turn to suffer.

A visit to Versailles. Walking around those gaudy rooms, listening to the tour descriptions blurring together. I’m not much of a history buff, but this was interesting. Built in the 1600s by Louis the Fourteenth, it definitely reflected the pomp and glory of the monarchy. You have to take the audio-tape tours with a grain of salt, since they’re don’t attempt to be objective at all. But I guess you would expect this from a country where the capital has more monuments than you can shake a stick at, most of which is built in honor of Paris.

I was definitely suffering from diarrhea, which made touring a little less fun. At night, we had dinner at a nice restaurant near the river in Paris, before a boat tour. The couple next to us were friendly, easy going, and loquacious. That was, until I mentioned Christina’s husband. You could visibly see them both stiffen up and their eyes bug out. Oh this was fun. We looked so much like a couple that they must have assumed we were having an affair. "Hey, you didn’t need to provide them that information!" "Well, I wanted to see what the reaction was. I won’t do it again."

A night boat tour of Paris is fun. Don’t expect any of your pictures to turn out (though some of mine did turn out well enough), but you can usually expect the mega-watt floodlights on the side of the boats to light up and embarrass couples in private moments along the walkways by the river. One man was eagerly smooching his partner and then opened his eyes to the massive floodlights and then put his face right in his hands, shaking his head while she looked embarrassed in spite of herself. I guess that’s one of the things they don’t tell tourists.

The Louvre. Much has been written about the overwhelming nature of it. If you spend half a day you can see much of it, but not too much. It was very pretty but I was also very sore. You can’t stand on your feet all day without getting tired. Or was it that I was gaining weight. So hard to tell. You see the usual… the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory, the Venus of Milo, and so on and so on. No tripods. Next time I visit Paris, I’ll bring a monopod. But actually, for the Louvre, much of it is so well lit with natural light that it’s not a big deal to shoot handheld if you have fast film. Then a visit to the Palais d' Nationale, where we saw street performers work the crowds. Then dinner in the Latin Quarter. The guy next to us overheard our conversation, and could not help chipping in. Once again, we saw him build this romantic image of us. Oh, what a pity, she lives in Hong Kong, and he in the Valley. They’ve known each other for nine years, but have only managed to get away together this time. First time in Paris together. Oh, they see each other once a year. How do they manage? This time, it was Christina who mentioned her husband. Once again, his eyes bug out, and he says, "I’m staying out of this one." We both laugh and correct him. No, we’re not having an affair, it’s just a really unusual situation, ok?

We stayed up late the night before talking. So it’s late before we get up. We get up late, have a slow lengthy lunch, grab a pre-made lunch, and start work on Christina’s postcards. I write some of them so that her friends will think she’s on drugs. We mail the cards, and then I walk her to the train station, to the airport, and then we take care of a bunch of paper work. We say goodbye to each other, and then I get back, grab my photo gear, and grab picture after picture, feeling empty inside. It’s midnight by the time I get back from trying to make all the pictures I can, and then I fall asleep.

The next day, I pack up my stuff, pay the hotel bill, and head for the airport. The trip was too short, but seeing a close friend whom I never get to see made me realize something: we didn’t need to go anywhere. It was simply a great excuse to get together and get away from everything else. That’s what friends are for.