<< June 8, 2005 >>
mon quatrième jour à Paris

i think i'm finally starting to get hang of things.

this morning i took the 14 instead of the A to the B; much faster. unfortunately, the B train i got stopped at every stop between where i got on and where i was going. if i get there a little earlier i think there's one that only stops twice.

my failover demo went off without a hitch. i have thought (although i don't think i've mentioned it) that 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 were great releases at the time, but 1.4.3 is truly excellent, if you want to fail over a lot. 1.4.4 looks to be even better.

i walked with one of the guys from the company i'm visiting, and asked him for dinner recommendations. see, choking down monday's dinner gave me the strength and courage i needed to get through the piece of beef i was given for lunch yesterday, but i wasn't feeling very inspired to try my luck stumbling into some place at random.

anyway, he recommended chez Clément, while his girlfriend suggested Le Patio Provençal. i don't remember why, but i decided on the latter. he also said to look on pages jaunes for the address before i set out.

unfortunately i forgot to do this, and when i did remember, i didn't go back. for some reason i thought i could find it on my own.

i could take two trains to get there, or one and then a short walk. i decided to walk, so once i got above ground i spent a good 15 minutes trying to figure out which way was north. a problem i have with paris is that all the buildings are the same height, so if you aren't near the river, the eiffel tower, or sacré cœur, it's hard to tell which way is which. i am glad i got new contacts before i came here, though, because i've had to do a lot of street and metro sign reading.

i eventually got to where i thought the restaurant was, but quickly realized i was not going to find it by accident, and that i am an idiot. so i took the metro back to the hotel. i looked the place up on the internet, and realized that, while i was very close, i would not have found it. back on the metro (the 14 is awesomely fast), and i quickly found the place. i was so excited to have finally found it that when the waiter told me they were totally full, and to try the place next door (which was even more crowded), i almost cried.

so i walked around a bit, and then decided to try the other suggested place. the only problem was that i hadn't looked up its address when i was back at the hotel. i knew it was on the champs-élysées, so i took a metro over there.

after walking around the arc de triomphe, i spotted chez Clément right away. i even remembered walking by it on sunday night!

i have discovered a few differences between boston and paris. first, almost all of paris smells funny, while in boston it's just east cambridge. second, i have never seen a policeman in boston urinating publicly. in my 4 days in paris, i have seen two. this may have something to do with the previously noted difference.

the third is that the sun sets upwards of 10:30 here. i have probably seen more sun here this week than i did all winter in boston.

so anyway, after trying to find a place for like 2 hours, i finally sit down as the sun is setting behind the arc de triomphe, lighting the sky up like... some sort of pink thing. i would have taken a picture, but i figured that google had nicer ones. this one is the closest, but i was much closer and there were fewer cars.

unfortunately they had neither of the two things i originally ordered.

but, as far as non-salmon goes, it ended up being a good dinner and put me in a really good mood.

which is what i needed, after going to sleep last night flea-bitten and hungry.