Trips! Trips! Trips!

Hello again. I hope this Sunday finds you well and that you are not to depressed about last night's Packer loss. I was just alerted this week to the presence of a Packer bar in Paris, which is pretty shocking considering the average Parisian's disdain for American culture. I'm stereotyping, I know. But really, if they're going to participate in any aspect of our culture I am surprised it would be American football. I guess there are probably enough ex-pats in Paris to keep that place going.

Anyway, this weekend has been devoted to sweatpants and bottle(s) of 1 euro wine (and it's not disgusting! I felt like Magellan when I found it. What a discovery!) and trip planning. It has taken over my life. Which is not too impressive a feat because let's remember, I live in Perigueux. It starts this upcoming weekend with a trip to London. I'll be meeting Kristin, who will be participating in a job fair for the upcoming school year. The fair takes place at a hotel overlooking the Tower Bridge, and we will also be staying there. Here is a picture from the hotel website of one of the views:

She'll be at the fair during the day and I'll explore, then at night we'll be able to hang out. I'm pretty excited about this - I have only been to London once - about 10 years go, and I don't remember much. I do remember that it was right after the US invaded Iraq. I'll never forget that because people brought it up nearly every time they realized we were American. They weren't impressed.

The second weekend in February I'll be going with a bunch of girls from the program to Milan for the weekend. We found round trip plane tickets on one of the budget airlines for 40 euro - which is the same price as the train tickets to get from Perigueux to Bordeaux to catch the plane- about an hour train ride. Ridiculous! But we'll take it. Since there are six of us, we opted to rent an apartment - living the hostel free dream! Wooo.

I also have another break from school coming up during the first two weeks of March and am planning to explore Portugal and Spain. Unfortunately it won't be warm enough for the beaches yet, but I'm sure it will be a lot sunnier than it is here! And I'll be able to sample wines from other regions - an important civic duty. Good thing I've already learned my lesson about Port wine - you actually aren't supposed to drink half the bottle like you can with other wines (by "you" I mean "I") due to the 20% alcohol content. That was a fun night. Oh well, most alcohol - related lessons we must learn the hard way, right? Mid April will bring Ms Barb and Mr Marty (it's ok if I call you guys that, right?) to Germany and I'm excited to meet them there. Hopefully I'll hit up Amsterdam and Belgium on either the way to Germany or on the way back to France. I'm not going home without trying Belgian fries. I've heard so much about them.

I'll return from that trip in time to meet my parents, who arrive April 30 for a two week trip. We're going to rent a car and do some traveling around France. And THEN Megan and I are going to fly home, making a few day stop in Iceland on the way. I still can't believe we're doing this. It all started on Friday night when we were looking online for potential flights home in May - she'll be going back to DC and I back to WI. We were alarmed by the $3000+ one way tickets back to the states and wondering if they'll go down eventually. Then Megan pointed out that there was a $550 flight back to DC from Paris via Iceland. And we thought, "wouldn't a few day layover in Iceland be cool?". A google image search of Iceland confirmed that yes, it would be cool. I realized that easyjet, our budget airline of choice, runs a 60euro flight from London to Reykjavic, and then the flight back to DC from there would only be $260! Dollars, not Euros! So we jumped on it. I found a $100 flight from DC to Madison, so we're pretty excited that not only are we getting home for about 1/6 the cost we were anticipating, but we get to explore Iceland, too. It really does look amazing. For example:

and :

Exciting things to look forward to! Traveling was the #1 reason I came here (maybe not the best #1 reason, but it's true), so looking forward to these events will hopefully get me through the work part of this situation, which I still haven't figured out how to approach without stress. I am in the process of making Rainman - like countdowns to each of these events, but I'll stop there. Rick Steves and I have some work to do. We've had quite a weekend together already, let me tell you. Have a good week!