19 states, 31 days, 7,818 miles

I know it has been quite some time since I posted on the blog. I have just returned from a 31 day road trip. With Will, we took my little Kia Rio all over the country.

States visited in this order:
Arizona
New Mexico
Texas
Oklahoma
Missouri
Tennessee
Illinois
Michigan
Kentucky
Indiana
Wisconsin
Minnesota
South Dakota
Wyoming
Montana
Idaho
Oregon
Washington
California

Overnight stays:
Grand Canyon National Park - free camping
Santa Fe, NM - free camping
Norman, OK - $10 camping
Arnold, MO - Will's grandma
Memphis, TN - Will's aunt & uncle
Yorkville, IL (Chicagoland) - My good friend Chris
Whitehall, MI - My mom
Louisville, KY - Will's aunt & uncle
Corydon, IN - My good friend Cathy
Madison, WI - My good friend Anna
Badlands National Park, South Dakota - free camping
Livingston, MT - free camping
Happy Valley, OR - Will's aunt & uncle
Seattle, WA - My friend Monika
Portland, OR - My friend Bill
Oakland, CA - Will's friend Kyle

More details to follow on specific places! Just wanted to let you know I am around and alive. My show was postponed for several weeks which allowed me to do this much traveling. I figured I should take advantage of all this free time when I have it. We are scheduled to start performing again in mid-August thru the end of August. Hopefully, I will have a more concrete future with this show in the upcoming weeks as this become either more solidified or dissolves completely. In the meantime, stay tuned for an update.

Delays, delays...

While rehearsals for my show have been going along swimmingly, we are currently in a state of flux and delay. I was told on Friday afternoon that our Boston dates (originally planned for June 11-14) have now been pushed back to. Early sings point to it moving to July. This means a couple things to me. One, we have more rehearsal time. This is actually a really good thing because 2 of the 6 actors really could have used more time to further develop their characters/performance. Two, my July travel plans may need some changing but we shall see how that goes once more is confirmed. Three, we still get paid for either rehearsal or performance, which is nice and necessary. Fourth and finally, we are still planning on performing at least one weekend in June. I think (and I stress think since things are constantly changing right now) that we are performing in Peoria, IL and Saginaw, MI in the same weekend (June 19-21). However, until everything gets confirmed, I really don't know what we're doing besides rehearsing until we start performing. That's all we can really do anyway.

That's about all that is going on my life that is noteworthy unless you count getting rear-ended last week on the highway. I love stop and go traffic, don't you? Nothing serious as far as rear-end damage goes though my body shop guy was happy to hear from me again. :) I am taking Lulu (my car) into the shop this week and the other person's insurance already paid me for the work to be done. That was nice! No one was hurt and we weren't going that fast. My bumper is askew and my trunk is hard to open now but it barely looks like I was hit. My poor car has had so much body work but she still runs great which is all I care about. She'll have her LA plastic surgery done this week anyway.

Keep your fingers crossed that my show actually starts moving forward since I, along with all my actors, are very anxious to start performing and get out on the road. I am still really excited about the opportunity. I am just really ready to get moving now.

Joshua Tree

Last weekend, Will, 3 of his friends and I took a trip down to Joshua Tree for some camping and hiking. I have never been to this National Park and I must say...for being in the desert, it was pretty awesome. The views were phenomenal. We got to the campsite pretty late due to horrible traffic getting out of LA. It took us hours and hours to get there. By the time we arrived, it was already completely dark out and we couldn't find a ranger station to double check our site number. We ended up just grabbing a campsite that seemed vacant and setting everything up in the dark. I am so glad that both Will and I know how to set up my tent in our sleep since we could barely see what we were doing. After tent set-up, I started the fire and we all enjoyed a lovely campfire talk and drink.

The next morning, we met up with 5 other people and hiked the trail called "Hidden Valley" in Joshua Tree. This was intended to be an easy hike with minimal effort. We ended up deciding to climb rocks and climb rocks we did. We actually scaled a mini-mountain. I hope this picture gives you some idea of how we climbed and how far we went.

This trip was definitely one of the highlights of coming back to LA so far. I love the diversity of this area (desert, ocean, all within easy driving distance).

More posts to come as rehearsals have finally started (as of yesterday) and we are slowly but surely getting ready for the big push to finish before we leave on June 10th for our first weekend performance in Boston, MA. This week should be pretty easy as we are still in the discovery phase of the show but as we progress, things will fall into place pretty quickly. I am so excited to see how we are going to develop the performance in such a short time period.

The return to Los Angeles

So, as previously mentioned, I returned to LA about 7 weeks before I had originally intended. My flight was pretty uneventful. I flew from Marseille to London and changed airports in London. That was my biggest fear since I had so much luggage. How was I possibly going to get my luggage (which is always stressful for me since it generally gets lost) from one place to the next. Thankfully, it was really easy with luggage carts and helpful bus drivers. There is a direct airport to aiport transfer bus in London which minimized my total travel distance with all the luggage. Going through customs in London was a bit surprising since they asked me a ton of questions even though I was only in the city for like 5 hours. I guess that raised a flag with them though. Upon arriving in Heathrow, I was attempting to check in when the curt woman at the check-in desk told me that I didn't have a ticket and that I needed to contact my travel agent. I was a bit shocked since I had changed my original plane ticket and KNEW that my change was effective. I had called British Airways and confirmed my flight and had checked my flight status online multiple times. After unsuccessfully reaching my travel agent that I had used for this portion of the trip, I tried to remain calm. I went to the reservations desk (not the check-ins desk) for British Airways and basically told them to find my ticket. I am not sure what happened exactly but the nicer woman found my reservation and checked me in. British Airways (besides the rude woman at the check-in desk) is an AWESOME airline to fly. The food was pretty decent, all of the drinks were free (including alcohol) and there was a bunch of on-demand video and music to entertain me the entire 8 hour flight.

I flew into Chicago where Chris met me and YES! all of my luggage did arrive. We drove halfway to Whitehall to meet up with my mom who would take me the remainder of the way home. I spent about 48 hours in Whitehall. Most of that time was spent meeting my nephews for the first time. I can't believe how small yet how large they both are. I was smitten.
(Liam is on the left and Aiden is on the right)

I spent the remainder of my time, unpacking, repacking and deciding what was going back to LA with me on this trip and what I would get on the 2nd trip. It was a little like Christmas when I got home because I got to see clothes and things that never made it to France that I had planned on having there. After packing up my car, I was off. I met Will (who had flown into Chicago to meet me for the trip) that night (Thursday) and we drove about 2 hours before stopping somewhere near the Illinois border. At first I was a little nervous about not really having hotel reservations but that fear quickly vanished as I saw so many hotels with vacancy.

Friday was the beginning of the huge push to get across the country. On Friday, I had the unfortunate opportunity to once again drive through Iowa and Nebraska on the infamous I-80 highway. I can't tell you how much I despise driving through these wasteland states. There is NOTHING to see. The corn wasn't even up yet so it was just rows and rows of ungrown nothingness. Anyway, the plan was to stop right over the Colorado border in Julesburg, CO. Unfortunately, Julesburg was pretty much empty and devoid of anything that resembled a city worth staying in. Since we weren't super exhausted yet, we made it to Sterling, CO.

Saturday, we began the journey across the entire beautiful state of Colorado and arrived in Beaver, UT for the night. What can I say about Beaver, UT? Well, there's not much to comment on except that there's a correctional facility there and NOTHING is open after 11:00pm. We arrived right before 11pm but weren't worried about finding something to eat. If all else fails we said, we can go to fast food. Well, apparently in Utah, the sidewalks roll up at 11pm (including McDonald's drive thru!). We had to settle on snacks from the gas station across the street from our hotel. They did have cheese curds though! That was awesome. I had definitely missed those. Apparently, Beaver, UT is home to a cheese curd emporium that we really wanted to check out but they were closed on Sundays. :(

Sunday was definitely the hardest day of driving we had. We drove through Utah, Nevada, Arizona (though it's just a tiny part of Arizona) before arriving in the desert of California. The views on the Saturday portion of the trip was amazing. Colorado and Utah are quite beautiful to drive through. Nevada and California desert are less desirable. Lacking air conditioning became a serious issue by the time we passed Las Vegas. We were stuck in a long traffic jam after we passed Vegas and my car started to get a bit overheated and the braking response was strange. We decided to pull over as soon as we could into a shady gas station area and let it cool down for awhile. I did push my car pretty hard since she hadn't been driven in 8 months and her first drive is across the country. Anyway, the car was fine after about a half hour of cooling down. We finally arrived in Los Angeles on Sunday, May 17 evening after 2,291 miles.

I think I will probably post here more about what I am doing now and how my show is going for those interested. I don't think I have much more to post about France though I will probably have at least one more item on France to write about my first week here and what culture shock I have experienced.

Nice/Monaco

My apologies for the lateness in this post. I have been rather busy if you didn't notice from previous posts. For my final weekend in France, Cathy, Dawn and I went to Nice, France with a side day trip to Monaco. We left on Saturday, May 9 and stayed overnight. Cathy had already been to Nice which was rather convenient since she already had an idea of what we should see and where we should go. The train ride to Nice was nothing short of breathtaking. There were some really incredible views in the 4 hour train ride. We had a great time playing Mille Borne (card game) on the train and eating endless jellybeans. After arriving, we went to check into our hotel only to learn that we were too early. So we left our bags at the hotel for the time being and headed straight over to the beach for some sightseeing. Our hotel was really conveniently located near the beach. This is the Nice beach view from above:
Much of the beach is rock, not sand. This was actually a conscious choice of the city. With the rock, the water is much clearer as you can probably tell even by this picture. After walking along the boardwalk, we walked up this huge hill which gave us the view of Nice that you see in the above picture. There were some amazing panoramic views from this vantage point. We could also see the Nice harbor and the ruins of a 13th century cathedral.

After climbing the high hill, we headed over to the flower market which was sweet smelling and beautiful. After this little walk, we headed back to the hotel to finally check in and decide on dinner. We went to what we thought would be a promising restaurant with a nice 10 Euro menu deal. 3 courses for 10 Euros seemed to be a really good deal. While the food was ok, it certainly wasn't amazing. Dawn's main course was a disappointing fish which was semi-cold and very bland. Cathy had lasagna and I had steak and fries. The dessert, tiramisu, was pretty good and Dawn's pineapple seemed fresh. Oh well, for that price on the Promenade des Anglais (the main street with the boardwalk along the waterfront), we were still really lucky.

Before dinner, Cathy and I stopped at a local grocery store to get a couple snacks and I saw this:
That's right my friends. Wine in Juice box form. I knew it existed and now you all have proof.

Anyway, after dinner, Cathy and I left Dawn to relax in the hotel room while we went exploring to try and see the Cathedrale Russe (Russian cathedral). Unfortunately, the gates were all closed and locked up tight for the evening. That didn't stop us from walking the entire perimeter trying to get in for a better view. We saw someone in the grounds taking a jog so we were sure we could get in. Unfortunately, after about an hour of trying to get in and walking all the way around the gates, we were unsuccessful. It was fun anyway though. :)

Our hotel, which I would highly recommend for anyone, was really clean and spacious for a 3 person room. We even had a kitchenette which was rather surprising. Having a fridge in our room was really helpful and convenient.

After paying a whole 1 Euro, the next day, we checked out of the hotel and headed to Monaco. That's right. The 30-45 minute bus ride from Nice to Monaco is 1 whole Euro and includes beautiful sights along the way of the shoreline. Monaco (the 2nd smallest country in the world...Vatican City is the smallest) was pretty cute. We had a cafe when we first arrived and then began the ascent into the Prince's Palace area which is up a huge hill that overlooks the Monaco landscape. We got to see the changing of the guard with a small ceremony. It's a very touristic place so it got pretty crowded while we were in the palace area. We decided to take a little tourist train that took us all over Monaco and Monte Carlo. Monte Carlo was preparing for the Grand Prix (which was a couple weeks after we were there) so we got to see some of the racetracks. Of course, we saw the famous Monte Carlo casino but didn't go in due to a lack of time. After our tourist train, we went into the Monaco Cathedral also known as St. Nicolas Cathedral and saw Grace Kelly's tomb (among others). We took the train (instead of the bus) back from Monaco to Nice. The views were pretty great coming along a different way though we did have to pay 1.70 Euros so you know, I guess the bus is a better deal. :) Though traveling to another country for less than 2 Euros is pretty great in my book. The train ride home to Montpellier was very long but entertaining as we played more Mille Bornes and Uno. We made noise on the train which is always frowned upon in France but we had a blast, and that was what really matters.

I had an amazing time and am so happy that I was able to fit this last trip in before I left France for my next big adventure. Thus, I leave you with this funny sign. Good thing they tell you how close the freaking defibrillator is.


Here's a link to all the photos if you are interested:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jkimpfbeck/NiceAndMonaco#

Back in the States

Hi,
For those of you I may have neglected to contact, I am back in the US. I was offered a great job as a touring stage manager for a show and they needed me right away. I decided that it was the best idea and career move I could make so I have left France 7 weeks early to pursue my next big adventure. I will arrive in LA on Sunday at some point and we start rehearsal on Monday. We go on tour the first weekend of June, continuing on weekends throughout all of June. We have July off which is when I am actually going to spend more time with my family and friends that I haven't seen in 8 months and then go back out on tour in August. This, obviously, was all very last minute. I was offered the job last Sunday and 9 days later, I flew home. I have finally met my nephews, spent a day with my mom and am starting my cross country journey today.

I actually have another post I will do about my last week/weekend in France but that will probably have to wait a few days. Short version is that I said goodbye to all my schools, many kids cried, Cathy, Dawn and I went to Nice and Monaco and the next day I got on a plane.

I'm not sure what I am going to do with this blog now that I have left France... I'm happy to hear suggestions though. I could always write about my touring show if that interests people. I just don't know.

So look for a least one more post about my last week in France and then I guess I will decide what to do from there.

Coffee, rugby and the beach

This was in a shop window front. "Scotch makes people happy." What the hell?

Lately, we have spent a lot of time at the beach since the weather here has finally turned nice. I can't tell you how many times we have been now but it gets better every time. Yes, I have been swimming (twice now) even though the water is pretty chilly and numbing. It's still fun and salty goodness.

A lot of the assistants are starting to leave since the 7-month contract people are now finished. They ended their contract on April 30, while us 9-month contract people will be finished on June 30th. Dawn is now done and is staying in Montpellier for another month to just have a vacation and hang out. We went to a going away party on Friday (the first of many I am sure) and stayed super late while having a great time. A couple pictures from the party below:

(Dela, Sarah, Cathy and Monika)

(Cathy, me and Monika...another assistant)

On Sunday we spent the day watching rugby in the less than stellar conditions. We lost (22-8) but it was fun to watch no less. Leymi, Cathy and I enjoyed ourselves even with the drizzling weather.

(Cathy and Leymi)

We discovered a new coffee place (called Toast and Tea) that we have enjoyed twice now. Here are some artsy pics taken by myself and Cathy.

Yeah, that's right. My espresso was served in a shotglass.

(Church next to the cafe.)

So can you notice what the SPF is on this tanning lotion? What's the point?


When I was walking around Frontignan on Thursday, I happened upon this group of adults dressed like clowns dancing in a circle. No idea what they were doing or why but I had to get a picture. Enjoy.

Opera, opera everywhere

(One of the 2 Montpellier Opera houses at night. This one is in the center of town. This is the Opera Comedie)

I realized that I have been lax on my posting of my recent opera goings. First is the King Arthur opera. That was an AWESOME show. It was really like a cartoon/farce on stage. I really enjoyed it and it was a huge change from traditional opera. They grilled hot dogs on stage, for real. We could smell them all the way up in the balcony where we were sitting. Our seats, by the way, were possibly the worse seats I have had in quite some time. We were in the house left balcony and could only see like half of the stage. Though, if we stood up, which we actually did all the time, we could see just fine. Thankfully no one was behind us and we still enjoyed the show though it was entertaining standing up, looking at the stage and then leaning down to read the super-titles. Anyway, there were a lot of random scenes that I found really entertaining. The show was very loosely based around King Arthur's rise to the throne. There was a scene with a polar bear coming out of a refrigerator and penguins ice skating around. There were some skiers skiing around the stage on plastic sheeting that they had laid out. The conductor was something else. The first act, he jumped up on stage in a kilt. There were a ton of entracts where he would jump up on stage and talk to the stagehand/actor. Since they changed the set a lot, they had a lot of filler. In addition to the kilt, the conductor was wearing some crazy pants, a yodeling outfit complete with knickers and finally a tux. Other entracts included yodeling between the conductor and the stagehand and even silent Mexican-style singing. The show was only an hour and 45 minutes with no real intermission to speak of. There were shooting stars at one point of the show which were achieved by throwing glow sticks back and forth across the back scrim. It was awesome! I don't think I have laughed more at an opera ever.

The second opera I just saw on Tuesday was actually 2 operas in one night. The first act, the first opera Sancta Susana was a 28 minute German piece about a nun who, right before she took her vows, slept with a guy behind the church. The piece was a bit lame and not super exciting EXCEPT for the FULL MALE NUDITY. That was pretty cool. There was full female nudity as well but that wasn't as impressive for me. In the opera, the nun was having a flashback and we got to see the dirty nun's memories of sleeping with the guy behind the church. One second there was a guy on stage in only pants, the next second the pants are GONE! The opera itself wasn't that good or particularly interesting but the nudity made it worth the time alone. There was a lot of collapsing onstage with great emotion, a minimal set with a cross and flame and really quite overly dramatic. At the end of the show, 16 nuns plus a mother superior came out to yell at the nun who was having this crisis of conscious. I thought that seemed a bit odd since the show only had 4 people on stage for the first 26 minutes (the nun, the nun she was telling her story to and the naked man and woman).

The third opera (or 2nd of the night if you are keeping track) was called Le château de Barbe-Bleue (Blue-Beard's Castle). This show was much more theatrical and relatively entertaining. The hour long show was in some sort of German-derived language but I couldn't tell you for sure. There were only 2 actors on stage and I don't know if I have seen 2 actors with less chemistry. The show is about Blue-Beard bringing his fiancee to his castle to start their life together and she insists on getting into the 7 locked doors that she's noticed in the very dark, gloomy, sad castle. The African American Blue-Beard,who was probably in his late 50's, had the oddest costume. He was wearing a black suit with no shirt underneath. The suit was shiny and a bit ill fitting in the chest area. We got to see his belly a couple times. The white woman was wearing a very poorly designed white shimmery dress that didn't allow for much movement. She was really stiff, yet was supposed to be sexy and alluring. She wasn't actually that old (probably in her 30's) but her hair and makeup made her look to be in her late 50's as well. I wasn't sure why they wanted her to look older since she would have been more attractive without the makeup and strange hair bun. She also probably would have been more alluring and sexy if she was more age appropriately costumed and madeup.

Anyway, the show, while the plot wasn't that great, was well staged. There were a bunch of archways that lit up. They flew, rotated, moved back and forth and were used as the 7 doorways that the fiancee begged to be opened. We find out that one door hid the arsenal that had weapons with dried blood on them, one door hid the torture chamber, another door hid a lake of tears, and on and on until we get to the final door where we find a room that hid the 3 bodies of his previous wives. They were actually portrayed by three women standing in the door ways. No dead bodies on stage, sorry to get your hopes up. I'm still enjoying all the operas I have had the pleasure of seeing. I can't wait for the next one.

School exchange and madness on the tram

Yesterday, a trip to the beach was in order. The weather was gorgeous (about 79 degrees) and super sunny. After this beautiful day, on my way home, I was on the tram that was super crowded for that time of the day. Apparently, there was a little school trip of smaller children and they were coming home in the group with their supervisors on the tram. After many annoying minutes of children laughing and being dumb, the supervisors kept threatening them with some sort of punishment. Finally, one of the supervisors decided to tape some of the kids mouths closed. This wasn't really malicious since she pulled the tape right off. What I found really entertaining was the fact that some of the kids actually started volunteering to get their mouths taped. Wow! What was supposed to be a punishment turned into a game. French kids are weird huh?

I wanted to mention that we are still doing a bit of a penpal situation with the elementary school in the Grand Rapids area. We just received their Easter/St. Patrick's Day cards. After translating some very lengthy letters to my French kids, I found a couple really cute questions and comments and I wanted to comment on them.

Many kids asked what games they liked on the Wii or the DS, if they like their teacher, how many kids are in their class and cute questions like that. I loved that so many kids talked about their pets, their siblings and their favorite games to play. My kids, for the most part, were overjoyed that the Americans wrote back to them and asked so many questions. We are trying to send them all pictures of the kids so the Americans can see what real French kids look like! What I really enjoyed were how excited my kids were to design French themed cards to send back. They asked what we considered really French and when I mentioned baguettes and croissants, they were so surprised. I guess it makes sense. I mean, do you think that peanut butter is a very American thing? Peanut butter is next to impossible to find here and when you do find it, it's really expensive. How odd is that? So, many of my kids drew the French flag or the Eiffel tower or even a map of France with their location marked on the card. I am so happy I did this exchange because it really made me remember how exciting it is to learn about another culture. I hope my French kids remember this for a long time. I have even had some of my students ask if they could keep in touch with their penpals after the school year. That made me so happy.

Barcelona

Chris arrived on Tuesday, April 7th, after wandering around Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris for 5 hours waiting for me to get there from the Paris Beauvais airport (as I was returning from Scotland that day), we headed into town. Our train from Paris to Montpellier didn't leave til 7pm, so we had almost the entire day to wander. Aftter a pizza lunch on the Champs Elysées, we went wherever you could go with a suitcase. Chris graciously brought 2 suitcases with him. One was meant for just me to ship some stuff home in advance with him. Hurray for Chris!! We went to the Arc de Triomphe, walked the whole of the Champs Elysées to the Louvre, walked around the outside of the Louvre and ended at Notre Dame. We could see the Eiffel Tower but didn't go to it since we were returning to Paris in 5 days.

After the train trip to Montpellier and a quick repack, we left Wed. April 8-10 to Barcelona. We bought the cheapest train tickets possible so we had the longest journey possible of 6 1/2 hours. We talked the whole way and had a great time. We arrived into Barcelona around 6pm. After geting metro tickets and finding our super chill, highly recommended hostel, we hit the town for a little sightseeing and dinner. We walked along Las Ramblas (which is the main thoroughfare in Barcelona). We took lots of pictures of the street performers, little shops and tons of toursits. We wandered into this little piazza and decided on a cool tapas restaurant. Now, it should be noted that I do speak Spanish as well, though it's Mexican Spanish which is pretty close to Spain Spanish with a few exceptions. Unfortunately, I completely forgot that Barcelona was the capital of Catalan so everything was in Catalan and sometimes in Spanish as well. Thankfully, we were in a super toursitic city, so things were even in English and French for us (menus, directions & signs were mostly translated). I was a bit disappointed though because I was really excited to speak Spanish but alas, it was easier to speak in English or French to everyone. The Catalan language, if you don't know, is like if the language French and Spanish had a child...it would be Catalan.

We had super great tapas which I ordered in Spanish and of course, we had sangria. Here's our dinner:

Dinner is served very late in Spain, by the way. You have to plan on eating around 9:30 or 10pm for dinner. After dinner, we went home and tried to prepare for our only full day in Barcelona and sightseeing. Thursday was a very, very full day! We saw La Sagrada Familia which is a cathedral built and designed by Gaudi and is still in progress of being built. This has been in process for over a hundred years. This picture is what the ceiling looks like on the inside. Seeing La Sagrada Familia was almost worth the trip alone. It was so huge and awe-inspiring. The sulptures and angles on the building were just so amazing.


Here is one of the sculptures on the outside of the entrance. Look at how intricate and amazing it is, in stone! I have many more pictures of La Sagrada Familia in the photo album. The link to the album is at the end of this post.

After La Sagrada Familia, thanks for Chris' indispensable travel book for Barcelona, we gave ourselves a walking tour of the Gothic quarter of Barcelona. There we saw the Barcelona cathedral that we did not go in because they were charging 5 euros to get into it. I don't think you should have to pay to go into a church. Even Notre Dame is free to go into. We saw tons of cute little streets, did a little touristy shopping and even saw a man playing Spanish guitar in one of the alleys. There is some video of that in the photo album too. After lunch, we wandered some more and went to the Barcelona port/beach. We were really lucky to have such a beautiful day since the day before and after were pretty rainy. The beach was beautiful and the boardwalk was really full. More pics of the beach can be found in the photo album.

Then we decided to go to the Park Guell which is another Gaudi designed/inspired place. This place was really hard to find. Once you get out of the metro station, you actually have to know where you're going. There were zero signs that pointed us in the right direction. I actually went into the library near the metro stop and asked for directions. Turns out that you basically have to climb this really steep road to get to the park which overlooks all of the city. There are sections of the road that actually have escalators for pedestrians because it's so steep. The climb was worth it though. The park was beautiful and mosaics were everywhere. These buildings are at the actual entrance of the park but you can see the skyline a little in this pic too.

Here is the stereotypical shot of the park and I'm sitting on the curving bench that surrounded the whole park.After the park, we headed back to Las Ramblas to find dinner. We came across La Bouqueria, which, as you can see below, is a huge outdoor market that is setup and taken down every day. We got there in time to walk around as they started to take it apart. It was really crowded as people were scrambling to buy things before they got put away but really cool to see all the food.
Dinner was paella and huge steins of beer. The paella, unfortunately, wasn't very good either but thankfully the beer was huge and plentiful. Chris is demonstrating the size of our beer here.


After dinner, we felt the need for more sangria. We wandered the streets for awhile trying to find a good sangria bar. After being directed really poorly by some drunk American guy on the street to a non-existent bar, we settled on one not far from Las Ramblas but in a little alleyway. 3 pitchers later, we got a cab home since we missed the last metro by a couple hours (they stop running around midnight on the weekdays).

The next day, Friday, April 10, we had the whole afternoon before our train left at 5:30 so we decided to try both Dunkin' Donuts which is called Dunkin' Coffee in Barcelona and Burger King. I haven't had Burger King since leaving the US so it was a really great tasting whopper!! Below is a sign in Catalan at Burger King so you can kind of see the language. Dunkin' Coffee wasn't that great and way overpriced. It was 1.20 Euro for one donut. I felt that it was extortion!!


After more shopping, last minute souvenirs and wandering, we were finally on our way home. The train ride this time was 6 hours and we should have been home by 11:30pm. Instead, when we changed trains from the Spanish train (whose seats are super hard and uncomfortable, especially after 3 hours), we were in a French border town called Cerebère. I like to call it the French town of nothingness. You literally couldn't leave the station because there was nowhere to go except down a really creepy dark tunnel which neither Chris nor I wanted to brave since it was by then dark out when we got there. Our train was delayed leaving this town of nothingness for about 2 hours so not only could we really not go anywhere, what was supposed to be a quick layover turned into a most boring and uncomfortable stay in Cerebère. We arrived 2 hours late into Montpellier and thankfully, Dawn was kind enough to let both Chris and I stay at her place, about 5 minutes from the train station. Since Dawn and her roommate were still out of town, we got our own place that night instead of travelling the half hour back to my very full house of houseguests.

I would HIGHLY recommend Barcelona to everyone. We had such a blast and packed so much into 48 hours!!

Here's a link to all the pictures if you are interested:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jkimpfbeck/Barcelona#

Scotland

On Saturday, April 4, I travelled with Dawn to her fair country of Scotland. I was only to spend a few days but in that time, I had an amazing and wonderful time. We started out our trip by arriving in the Glasgow airport that is only about 15 minutes from Dawn's parents house. Both parents were there to meet us and take us home. I think the majority of my trip to Scotland is going to revolve around all the food I ate actually. Once we arrived to Dawn's house, we had what is called a "fry-up". In said fry-up, I got to try black pudding (which is more like a sausage type food all sliced up and not actually pudding). Black pudding is made from blood and it tasted nothing like blood so don't get too concerned. I also had square sausages (beef based), tattie scones (potato scones which were mostly like naan bread) and fruit pudding. Fruit pudding is also like a sausage type food but with fruit and not nearly as sweet as I had feared. I loved the fry-up.

After breakfast, we headed over to Glasgow to see the sights and sounds of the big city. I got to take a real Scottish train and everything. Glasgow city is about an hour train ride from Coylton (where Dawn lives). I arrived into lovely Scottish weather so walking around the city was a bit difficult since it was raining and cruddy out. We went to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. It was even free to get into. :) We had a great time seeing all the random pieces in the museum. I even saw a haggis!! See below.
After Glasgow, we went back home to a traditional haggis dinner at Dawn's parents' house. Haggis with neeps and tatties (turnips and potatoes). And I must say, haggis is DELICIOUS!! Dawn's mom even made vegetarian haggis for me in case I didn't like real haggis. Vegetarian haggis was good but it tasted a lot like lentils and carrot fillers. I got to try Irn Bru which is Scottish soda. It tasted like a mix of cream soda and a little bit of orange soda mixed in. It was good but a little disappointing. I thought it was going to be more exciting. I don't know why I thought soda should be exciting, though.

Here's everyone at the haggis dinner:
On Sunday, Dawn and I drove up to Stirling where she goes to college. It's about an hour and a half drive and the weather, though windy, was really sunny and beautiful. We arrived at David's (Dawn's boyfriends) apartment, grabbed him and went to the Wallace Monument. That was really cool since I didn't actually know that existed and that is was viewable from Stirling University even. We hiked up to the top of this nice, steep hill to see the monument which was pretty impressive. Here's a pic of the monument and the guy that was doing a little presentation on William Wallace's life.

The guy was really cool and very entertaining. We learned a lot about William Wallace (and surprise, surprise...Braveheart was not totally accurate). After the monument, we went over to Stirling Castle and saw a small portion of it. Mary, Queen of Scots, grew up in Stirling Castle. Unfortunately, due to renovation work, much of the castle was closed off. They were adding furnishing and tapstries to all of the castle rooms so we really only saw the great hall and the kitchens but it was fun to see the castle anyway. Right outside the castle gates, there's a huge statue of King Robert the Bruce and you can see the Wallace Monument from the castle.

We went out to dinner after sightseeing. We had a traditional dinner of roast beef, mashed potatoes and mixed veggies. The soup was cock-a-leekie. Which was actually chicken and leek soup but I loved the name of the soup. I even had The Tartan Special beer. It was good.

The next day we headed over to Loch Lomond, walked around, enjoyed the almost beautiful day (kind of overcast) and did a little shopping in the boardwalk area of the Loch area. Before driving home to Dawn's house, we stopped over at the Paisley Center (which is a theatre complex) to visit David's mom and get a little tour of the theatre. I was in heaven. It was a small blackbox theatre with a couple hundred seats. The coolest thing was seeing the booth and seeing that they use the exact same light board that I used in countless theatres. I was so excited to see that. I took geeky pictures, of course, of everything. Then, it was back to Dawn's house for dinner out with the family where I enjoyed Scottish salmon and sticky toffee pudding for dessert. After dinner, I wanted to get a few items from the store before leaving (random food items). We went to Tesco, which was like the Scottish version of Walmart, and had a great time taking pictures of EVERYTHING. One of my favorite items to see was this:
Or maybe this one:
(This is a small personal trampoline but I loved the name!!)

We ended the trip by watching Braveheart. Yep, that's right. We watched Braveheart in Scotland. Don't you think that's the best? :) Scotland was tons of fun and I have a ridiculous amount of pictures to prove it.

Here's a link to all the pictures if you are interested:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jkimpfbeck/Scotland#

A travelling holiday

This is just a short intro to what will be a longer post in a few days. I am now on my final vacation of the year and this one is a great one! It started on Friday, April 3 after 12pm when I was released from school early. Hurray! I spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday in Scotland with Dawn visiting. More on that in an upcoming post. My very good friend, Chris, from the Chicagoland area arrived in Paris this morning (Tuesday) and after it took me forever and a half to get to him from an airport in the outskirts of Paris that I flew into from Glasgow, we reunited for a fun filled 7 day trip he is spending here. We spent the day today walking around Paris with 2 suitcases which was challenging and entertaining. After a 3 1/2 hour train trip on the super fast train from Paris to Montpellier, we arrived just a short while ago for some much needed rest. I slept about 3 hours last night since my flight from Glasgow was at 6:30 am (forcing me to be at the airport by 5 am). Chris did not sleep at all on his overnight flight to Paris from Chicago so he was exhausted. We are resting up since tomorrow afternoon we are leaving for Barcelona. We will be there Wednesday, Thursday and returning late on Friday night. Saturday will be spent sightseeing in Montpellier. On Easter Sunday, we are taking the train back up to Paris to see more sights in the evening. Monday is totally devoted to Disneyland Paris!!! And Tuesday....Chris returns home and I make my way back down to Montpellier. Dawn will have already returned from Scotland by now. On Wednesday, we are both going to spend the night in Nice, France. The plan is to go to Nice on Wednesday, spend the night there and spend a few hours in Monaco since it's so close and return very late on Thursday night. The weekend should just be a resting weekend since it's back to school the following Monday. Anyway, specific posts will be added when I have more time but I wanted to at least post my upcoming, busy travel plans.

St. Patrick's Day in France

I figured since we were so close to Ireland (well, relatively close compared to the States), St. Patrick's Day would be celebrated in France. To my disappointment, it is barely celebrated here. Even the Irish bars in Montpelllier's neighborhood didn't have any Guinness or Killian's specials. It was really surprising. I guess I am used to the American celebration. People didn't really wear green, there were no decorations anywhere and there was only one real event, that I was aware of. Some of the bars had live Irish music but there were cover charges and it started late. :(

At the biggest English bookstore here, called "Book in Bar", they had a 30 minute presentation from a real live Irish man (who incidentally was a singer in an Irish band). He told us a lot about the history of St. Patrick, the celebration in Ireland and we got to see Gaelic written out. We learned the Gaelic alphabet, which was really interesting. In Ireland, St. Patrick's Day is a national holiday and nothing is really open. St. Patrick's Day is now a week-long celebration in Ireland and there are tons of bands that perform in parades and on St. Patrick's Day night they have fireworks!

Oh, I also learned that the alcohol content in beer in Ireland is much lower than it is in France. Which explains why people say they can drink 10 pints and still be able to stand. If you did that here, you might not be so strong. I can't remember the exact percentage but I know in Ireland it was like 2-3% alcohol and here it's like 6-8% alcohol.

After the little presentation (complete with a little handout), there was a free beer tasting at the Book in Bar (they are also a cafe, by the way). We got to have some Guinness and Killian's. Killian's tasted a bit different here than I am used to in the US. I was told that it's brewed differently and in the US, we have a lot more carbonation in beer in general in comparison. After the presentation and free beer tasting, we just headed over to my place and sat on my back porch and drank more Irish and German beers and enjoyed the nice weather that is finally starting to present itself here in Southern France.

Rude awakenings and Symphonic sounds

On Thursday of last week, my landlord's mother stayed overnight with us, in addition to their daughter who is actually moving in on April 1st to my great sarcastic delight. Her mother stayed with us due to some sort of spell she experienced at home. She has advanced Alzheimer's and some dementia. Anyway, they told me that she was spending the night and that she would be going back to her own house where she rambles around alone, apparently, the next morning. On Friday morning at about 5:30AM, I was awakened by my door being opened and my light being turned on. Apparently, grandma was ready to go and was looking for Léa (her granddaughter who was supposed to take her home that morning). Needless to say, Léa was not in my room and I was a bit confused as to what was going on. I told her Léa wasn't in here and she left. At about 6:15AM, my door was again opened and my light was turned on. Léa still wasn't in my room and grandma left me alone. When I did actually get up, after returning from the bathroom, grandma was just standing in my room asking where Léa was. I had no idea where she was and no one was actually in the house which was weird because who would leave grandma alone and especially, leave her alone with me, who doesn't know her? After locking my door so I could change in peace (yes, she tried to get in again while I was changing), I explained that I didn't know where anyone was but I was sure they would be back shortly and I had to go to work. I did actually lock my bedroom door before leaving because I didn't want grandma stumbling into my room and falling on my computer or anything.

Meanwhile, apparently later that morning, Léa came to get grandma and she was nowhere to be found in the house. Apparently, she had just left the house in her housedress and slippers and started wandering around the neighborhood. Several blocks away, a kind neighbor found grandma and took her into her house while calling the police to tell them that she had found this confused old woman wandering the streets. I guess Léa called the police too and eventually Léa and grandma were reunited. That's what they get for leaving poor grandma all alone in an unfamiliar place. I am glad that grandma was found safe and unhurt but how irresponsible of my landlords and their daughter, right?

Moving on, this weekend was full of symphony. Montpellier was host to the Quebec orchestra who had 4 free concerts that Dawn and I greedily took advantage of on Friday, Saturday and 2 on Sunday. Friday night's concert was a modern rock interpretation type thing. The first half was all music set to conincide with a crazy video montage. There were 4 pieces in the first half and most of them were not so great actually. I actually didn't pay too much attention to the music because I was so busy watching the crazy trippy video montages. There were a lot of blinking flashes and honestly, I am surprised people didn't go into epileptic seizures. Dawn said it was giving her a headache. One of the most notable videos was this artsy video of a girl. It was mostly just a closeup of her face. Sometimes she blinked, sometimes she smiled, one time she pulled her hair back, but mostly she just stared at the camera. And they set music to that!! The last video montage interested me the most but that's because I am a fan of horror movies. There were a bunch of flashes of red & black images of a disturbing nature. They were all close-ups of eyes blinking or teeth snarling or scary faces. I liked it!

And now for the second half.... where to begin? Well, it was definitely not at all the same as the first half. For one thing, the second half had no video. It also involved what they considered "singing". If only the people in the 2 pieces could actually sing. The first piece of the 2nd half was supposed to be in English (though I really only understood about 5 words in the whole 20 minute piece). There was one guy singing with the orchestra backing him up with music. Unfortunately for this guy, the music was about 2 octaves below his range so the whole song sounded forced and unintelligible. Besides a normal orchestra collection, they also used a wide array of random instruments/noise-making devices including crumpling newspaper, a kazoo, popping brown paper bags and those tube things you swing over your head that make a faint "woo" noise. At least the diversity in the instruments detracted from the fact that the singer was clearly out of his element and he had these crazy body movements he was using in order to poorly convey his message/lyrics.

The second piece was simply ridiculous. The singer was also the conductor. The singer was a soprano with a great range but besides that, she was not much to speak of. First of all, her "costume" was completely inappropriate. She was easily in her late 40's yet wearing these knee-high patent leather black boots with ridiculous heels that she couldn't really walk in. Her skirt was the length of a wide belt and that too was black patent leather covering hideous fishnet stockings. Her bodice, made of course of black patent leather, wasn't any better and it was topped by a long black jacket (of different material so it really looked out of place). At one point in the "song", she decided to rip off the jacket and throw it to the ground. Ridiculous and completely unnecessary! I say "song" because I don't think I actually heard any intelligible words. Dawn claims to have heard some but I'm not convinced. I felt like I watched a 15 minute piece where all the woman did was sing scales. She was also conducting the orchestra that was set up to her right so every few seconds she would make some random hand movement that I am supposing was conducting. Needless to say, I didn't enjoy her performance and yet she came out to bow 4 times. Good God!


Saturday night was definitely better...well, the 2nd half was. A funny thing happened to us while waiting for the symphony to begin. We were sitting in a box seat on the balcony (which was an amazing seat!). The crazy high-strung old woman usher felt the need to slam the door behind us when we got in and again slam the door on Dawn's face twice while we were trying to get out to use the facilities before the show. For whatever reason, you couldn't leave the door open to the box at any time. Which is fine and we could understand. But then when we tried to get out, she was standing at the door and closed it right behind me as I was exiting, meaning that she closed the door on Dawn's face. Then she had the audacity to ask us where we were going. I was like, uh, I don't need to explain myself to you at all. Let me pass. It was really ridiculous and she definitely had some sort of power trip for no reason.

After settling into our box seat (there were 4 of us, Junko, Dawn, Cathy and I), these 2 women came in and sat behind us. The box is big enough for 6. Meanwhile, they asked if their conductor friend from the 1st half would be able to sit in the front when he came at intermission. We said ok but it seemed a bit odd. About 3 minutes later, they had the audacity to ask to see our tickets because apparently, they were promised to sit in the front of the box and figured we had just snuck in. Now, remember that this was a free performance and it was first come, first serve tickets. You just had to go to the box office and say how many tickets you needed and at random, you got a spot. Apparently, the box office printed duplicates because we had the same tickets as these women. They left in a huff because we weren't going to leave the front of the box. And why should we? We were there long before them. Then! About a minute before the performance began, 4 people piled into our box and brang chairs with them. They sat in the very back of the box and surely wanted to move forward but we weren't about to move so they just complained behind us, thinking we didn't understand them since we were speaking English. Fools! Incidentally, they also felt the need to discuss the show or whatever on occasion during the perfomance of the piece. Real considerate, right?

The first 2 pieces in the first half were lifeless. I felt like they kept building up and building up and nothing ever came from the symphony. The 2nd piece of the first half felt like a soundtrack for a movie. Someone's running through the forest and then BAM! Something jumps out. They continue running through the forest and they all meet up. It was really weird and didn't actually come to an end. It just sort of stopped without any kind of finale. Very disappointing!

The 2nd half was great and, in my opinion, the best we saw all weekend. It was all percussion and wonderful. There were all sorts of drums, gongs, cymbals, etc. on the stage and very, very entertaining. There was even a female percussionist which made me happy to see. The pieces were upbeat, toe-tapping and great!

Sunday involved 2 performances. The first performance at 10:45AM was a string quartet. Now 4 of the 5 pieces were contemporary and the other piece was Beethoven. The contemporary pieces were really bad! I mean, really bad! The first one sounded like a screaming cat and the same chord for 12 minutes. We were super close to the stage and I kept watching their music, praying for them to get to the end of the piece. It couldn't end soon enough. The other pieces were about as bad. The Beethoven piece was great and it proved that his work is still wonderful and especially when put up against contemporary crap!

The 2nd performance on Sunday evening was a bit lopsided. The first piece was an orchestral piece written for a guitar soloist. That piece was first and fantastic. The guitarist was really talented and the piece was well-written to show off his talent. There were a couple full orchestra pieces that were pretty flat and lifeless. I found myself watching my watch, timing out how much longer the piece was. The final piece was an orchestral piece written for a violin soloist. The violinist was quite talented as well and the piece was well-written to display her talent as well. In general, I didn't think the pieces were all that good but the soloists, in their own respective performances, did a great job in trying to make the piece more interesting and lively.

Your British word lesson of the day: sore head = headache In a sentence: This video is giving me a sore head.

Day tripping: Perpignan

Today was another continuation in the day tripping adventures. Cathy, Dawn and I enjoyed the great weather and sunshine (not to mention occasional 30 mph winds) in Perpignan. It's about a 2-hour train ride west of Montpellier, near the Spain border. Perpignan is the capital of the Catalan region. The Catalan language is, from my best estimation, a form of Spanish with French snippets. The pretty interesting thing about being in Perpignan was the fact that most street signs were in French and Catalan (which I mistook for Spanish for awhile until I realized that the word for street was not correctly written if it was Spanish).

We walked all over the city and really saw the majority of this great city rich in history and medieval-ness. :) We first visited the Casa Pairal which was a really great tower looking over the city and originally one of the city's gates and then a prison. Drinking a coffee under this arch was really amazing.
After that, we went to Cathedrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste (we weren't allowed to take pictures inside) which was under a lot of repair and restauration. After the cathedral, we tried to go into the Campo Santo, which is the only cloister cemetery in France. For whatever reason, everything was locked up even though they were supposed to be open so we just took a couple pictures though the gates.

Then we went to the Tourism Office to see if there were any cool things going on in the city. Nothing too exciting actually. We then headed to the Casa Xanxo. According to the city map/tourism info, this was supposed to be really cool with carvings of the 7 deadly sins on the outside of the house and a DO NOT MISS patio where there was a 3-D map of Perpignan. I can't tell you how disappointing and lame this Casa was. The 7 deadly sin carvings were pretty worn away and almost impossible to really make out since they were really far from the street level view. The 3-D map of Perpignan looked like a train set that had been built in about 1970. Bless the 2 women who wokred there that were overjoyed to have some people to talk to though. Apparently, according to one of the women at this Casa, next month they are decorating all the fountains in the city with flowers and there will be a fanfare following the mayor around as he speaks about the history of each fountain.

After the Casa, we went to lunch and had some pizza (Flamenkuche to be specific which are like really thin crust pizzas made with a cream sauce without tomatoes). Dawn had muscles and fries. :) We then headed to the Palais des rois de Mallorca (Palace of the Kings of Mallorca). This was most definitely the highlight of our day. We got to see amazing views of the city and even paid 2 euros to walk around inside this castle type building. It was built in 1276 and a great example of Gothic architecture. Though the inside of the building was a little lack luster (no furniture to really speak of, just rooms), we went to the very top of one of the towers as you can see below. It was SUPER windy but fun anyway.

Inside one part of the Palace, there was a huge exhibition on different religions popular in the area at various times in its history. Since we weren't in the mood for reading for 2 hours, we kind of just breezed through all the artifacts but they did have a big section on Judaism and I saw some Torah replicas even. Ooh!

Anyway, the ride home on the train was most entertaining as we were playing Uno the entire way and disrupting all the people around us. It was great fun.

Here's a link to all the pictures if you are interested:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jkimpfbeck/Perpignan#

Your British word lesson of the day: dummy = slang for pacifier. In a sentence: I think that dummy is cute. You should get it for your nephews.

Quotable Quotes:
Cathy on seeing a sign on a window: 25 Euros a day? I don't care what it is. I'll take it! (It was a sign for car rental)
Cathy on our walk into downtown from the train station: I wanna see something pretty. Not this crap. I've been here for 5 minutes.

By the way, apparently Perpignan considers their train station to be the center of the world. That's what the tourism map says. Perpignan train station : The Center of the World. Here's a picture of it. You be the judge.

Faust

On Sunday, March 1, Dawn and I saw another Opera here in Montpellier. Faust was really great! There have been a lot of articles on this performance in the Montpellier Plus (the local newspaper) actually. After reading the synopsis, I was really excited to see the French incarnation. The show was 4 acts with one intermission. The whole setup was really interesting. The characters were dressed in 50's rock and roll style with very bright colors. There was a huge stage with walls that moved on and off. A huge long couch that was used all the time to wheel people in and out. The lighting was impressive. There was a lot of symbolic random dancing throughout the show as well.

The beginning was really frustrating because they had a scrim in front of the stage to create great shadow looks but it was lit on the side so you could barely see what was happening and I couldn't see anything! I was so frustrated for those 10 minutes of overture and action. Though we couldn't really see the action of the beginning, the devil character was really great! His 2 little cronies wore super tight red spandex bodysuits and had tails. They were really silly since one of them was kinda fat and his belly was really ridiculous. The devil character himself had horns and everything and a painted red face.

This show was really, really symbolic. It was difficult to really follow what was happening in general. Thankfully I read the synopsis beforehand because the show was laced with so much seemingly random imagery that I had a hard time actually understanding the plot. Basically, the guy who sold his soul to the devil to regain his youth fell in love with a woman who at first wanted to be with him. She seemed really interested but she wanted to wait until the next day to either consumate or declare her love for him. It was a little weird. Then at the end of the first act, I guess the guy didn't want to wait the one day and raped/kissed this girl. We guessed it was rape because the 2nd act opened with her being pregnant.

Then she said she was in love with the guy even though she was pregnant and seemingly confused. She ended up going to jail, we think, because it was very symbolic and a bit confusing. There was this really odd dance number in the middle of this act where the entire company came out and danced. The company was huge. I am guessing there were about 80 people in the cast. I think the dance number was showing the people of the city's reaction to the devil in the city or the death of the pregnant woman's brother. Like I said, everything was a little confusing. In jail, the woman gave birth and killed her child in the same instant (that was interesting staging since she pulled a plastic baby doll from under her shirt and stabbed it. Then attached it to a hanging column of plastic babies). The 4th act was the most interesting and confusing.

The 4th act was the girl going to hell and the devil arriving with his cronies. Now I wish I had watched more of what was actually happening but there was a really distracting archbishop type character all the way upstage. This archbishop spent almost the entire 4th act painting with a paintbrush attached to a long pole. He was painting on a back wall that was hanging from the fly space. The first wall/panel he painted an upside down red cross. Then that was pulled up into the fly space. The second wall/panel he painted was this weird drawing/sketch of a devil that turned into a woman. It was really, really impressive and confusing. The third wall/panel was a guillotine. What I did see of the 4th act was a random dance number showing that they were in hell with a bunch of scantily clad girls who decided that topless was the way to go for some of the erotic dancing. At some point of the final act, the guy joined the girl in hell but I couldn't figure out why he was there and what he was trying to accomplish because he never got with the girl. At the very end of the show, I guess the woman went to heaven (we're not sure how or why) because the show ended with a very bright white light on the back wall.

There was a couple of random female dancers that would randomly dance across the stage at random intervals in different outfits. It was really weird and Dawn and I looked at each other a couple times when that happened. I guess I wasn't the only confused person there. A lot of the write-ups in the newspaper are people criticizing the staging and director choices. Not that the show is bad, just that many people didn't like how it was presented (costume choices, design choices, general staging choices). I really enjoyed it, even if I was a little confused.

The 2nd trip to London

For Mom's final days in Europe, we hopped back over to London to spend the night since she was flying out of London on Saturday, the 21st. Since we were only there for a day, we just ran around the city trying to accomplish that which we did not while there the first time. Most notably visiting Buckingham Palace. A few pictures below.

Unfortunately, on the day we arrived there was no changing of the guard so we didn't get to see that. However, we did get to see a cool horse-drawn carriage go in and out of the gates. They picked up some guy inside the gates (no one famous that we could tell) and they went for a little ride. Other than that, there's some cool gardens/grounds to see around the castle but we didn't really walk around in there. Mom really wanted to see the traditional guards who weren't there.
Thankfully, we ran into an "official" guard along the way from the palace. Mom was overjoyed.

After seeing Buckingham Palace, we headed over to Picadilly Circus where the majority of the theare in London can be found, as I mentioned before. In an effort to be rid of me for a few hours, Mom graciously purchased me a ticket to see Chicago. It was AMAZING. The Bob Fosse choreography alone was worth the time. I sat in an amazing seat since we bought the ticket from a street vendor who specialized in half price tickets. I was in the orchestra and pretty close to the stage. The women who played Velma and Roxie weren't all the spectacular but all the other actors were wonderful and very talented. I was so excited to see these numbers performed live.

After the show, I met back up with Mom who spent the afternoon wandering around being a tourist and taking pictures. We decided on a traditional pub dinner and we were served by the most British girl ever. She definitely used to be a barmaid turned server. But she was pleasant. Mom had fish and chips again with an ale and I had sausages and potatoes with an ale. It was a wonderful way to end our trip in London. Our hotel room was decent enough though it had the tiniest bathroom with a shower you have ever seen. If airplanes had showers with bathrooms inside, our hotel was the proof. Needless to say, we both banged our head and various body parts while trying to shower. It was entertaining, at least. We got a "traditional" English breakfast from our hotel as well. It was called "traditional". I would call it a hard-boiled egg, toast, tea and coffee. Oh well. Mom flew home Saturday morning and I flew back to Marseille to spend another night with Laurent and the family before finally returning home on Sunday night via the ever exciting train.

I had a wonderful time with my mom being a tourist and seeing so much more of cities I have already visited and many that I had not. I'm so grateful my mom was able to visit me and I won't forget this trip.

Here are all the pictures from this trip if you are interested:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jkimpfbeck/LondonWithMomNumber2#

Mom in Paris

For a few days during Mom's visit, we went to Paris and visited all the touristy attractions. We stayed from Tuesday, February 17 - 19. After the 3 hour high-speed train from Marseille, we checked into our Hotel Grand Magenta which was super pink all around. The room was mega pink and actually not too bad. After the few minutes in our hotel room, we were ready to experience Paris. We saw the Arc de Triomphe and then headed right over to the Eiffel Tower. We actually ran into my friend Cathy and her cousin while getting out of the metro. In a city of millions of people, we ran into her. What are the odds? The Eiffel Tower was amazing at night, as it was in January. We went all the way to the top of the tower and saw a great view of the city all lit up. My favorite part of the Eiffel Tower at night is the cool light show that happens on the hour, every hour, after sunset. Here's the video I finally got of it:



Our second day in Paris was devoted to visiting Versailles castle and seeing Laurent's parents for dinner. Versailles castle is where Louis IVX, XV and XVI lived along with Marie Antoinette as well. It's about an hour outside of Paris by train.
The inside of the castle is amazing as well but the pictures are kind of dark so I'm not posting any of those here. The gardens are beautiful as well but the weather was a bit overcast so they weren't as impressive. I guess they had turned off the fountains because it was still winter but trust me; the castle and the grounds/gardens, along with the fountains, are amazing. After our visit to Versailles and touristy shopping, we were picked up by Laurent's parents and went to their house for dinner.

Here is Mom and Laurent's mom having a great time after dinner. The food was scrumptious, the champagne was plentiful and the cheese was new and interesting. It was a wonderful evening and I hadn't seen Laurent's parents since I lived in France 10 years ago, so it was great to visit with them again. Laurent's mom is much like my grandmother who passed away and both my mom and I really noticed a lot of similarities. It was great to see them! We got to take a cab back to our hotel in Paris, which was fun since I rarely ride in cabs in the first place. The cab driver got a little lost leaving the suburb, Bievres, where Laurent's parents live. That was entertaining since we definitely couldn't help him.

Our 3rd and final day in Paris, we took another tourist bus, as we did in London, and went all over Paris. Inside Notre Dame, we saw this fire blanket box.
Notice on the 2nd picture here, how CALM the guy on fire is just waiting for his friend to put a blanket on him. :)

The bus took us all over the area of Paris including all the touristy spots. I finally saw the Moulin Rouge which made me really happy. If only it wasn't over 100 Euros to see a show. Even if a half bottle of Champagne was included, it's still too expensive. :(

Anyway, we had a great time seeing everything in Paris and the photo album below can attest to that. Feel free to skim if you are interested since there are a TON of pictures (and this was after editing).

Here are all the pics from Paris:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jkimpfbeck/MomInParis#