26 kinds of Champagne.
4 days.
Some said it couldn't be done.
We proved them wrong.

Break out the bubbly!

We're leaving in a couple of hours for Reims, Champagne capital of France!

I hear there's some nice churches there...

See you in a couple of days.

Erik's other career....

Had a good laugh after finding this headline in my news inbox.

Blues take Erik Johnson No. 1

Allez les bleus!

My fitness class was cancelled tonight. Because of the 'match de foot'. France just scored and the city went crazy. Erik ate dinner with his head craned around to see the tv. Ahh...football.

I'm not complaining.

They scored again. I guess that means they're moving on...

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Other funny things that have happened this week:
-Daryl ordered a Hoegarten last night at dinner and got a Long Island Iced Tea.
-Erik ordered the cheese course at dinner on Tuesday. It was a full wheel of raw milk camenbert. About halfway through the wheel, Erik asked the waiter if he was expected to eat the whole thing (it was quite delicious!). The waiter couldn't stop laughing! When he cleared our dessert plates, Erik's plate was put on the counter next to someone elses. They had only a tiny wedge. Not too bad for someone who once claimed to be lactose intolerant!

That's it for now. Tomorrow is my last Saturday! I can't wait. Although I need to spend this weekend planning for the camp that starts in two weeks. Any ideas of things I can do with 13year olds that are related to American Culture? I feel like I don't have any good ideas...

Hope everyone has a fantastic weekend!

La fete de la musique--or, the longest day of the year.

Before I spill the beans, here are some good guesses from mom...
Guess number 2- You came home from shopping to find that your appt. was being fumigated, so you ate in the hall

Guess number 3-It was 45 degrees celsius in your appt, and only 30 in the hall, so you decided to eat there.

Guess number 4- you wanted to picnic, but it was raining outside and the hall was the alternative "out of the appt" location.

Guess number 5- the mess in the appt was beyond eating around, so like the Mad Hatter, you changed locations

Guess number 6- when you went into your appt to eat lunch, there was a rat/bat already waiting for the party to start, so you ate in the hall before doing pest control.

So, yup, we locked the keys in the house. Just as the door closed behind me as we were leaving last night, I realized I hadn't picked up my keys. Unfortunately, no one had picked up the other set of keys either. After trying to find our landlady for about an hour, we realized that we actually couldn't leave the building, or we wouldn't be able to get back in. Luckily, we had a picnic in hand, as we were supposed to head over to Zoes to eat before enjoying the Fete de la musique. So, Nancy and I headed out to the grocery store to pick up some essentials like a bottle opener, a knife, more wine, more bread, etc. and after returning to our building, we parked ourselves outside our elevator and enjoyed a delicious meal.


Nancy had smartly noticed that the Inno closed at 9:50, so as we approached the bottom of bottle number two around 9:30, we set out again for more sustinance in the form of wine and chocolate. When we returned, the reality of not getting back into the apartment tonight was starting to weigh on us. One of the residents who had helped us initially, also gave us the number for the serrerier, or locksmith. We made the call around 10:00 just to find out how much it would cost. For the low price of 180euros, someone would come to our place and open the door. We told them we'd call them back if we needed them. However, weren't we surprised when someone got off the elevator on our floor saying he was here to open our door. Great. He tried for about three minutes with some special paper before deciding that he couldn't open our door. Well, he could, but it would involve drilling a hole in the door (same price) or breaking the lock (800euros). We decided to keep waiting for the landlady. We were not impressed that he then told us we had to pay for his time. I mean, we told the company we didn't want anyone to come yet. After a heated phone call with them, and another heated argument with the guy, we forked over 21euros and he left.

Here he his working his magic.

Then Erik and Daryl decided to try to open the door with a Rogers video card.

It didn't work either.

So, we finally start thinking about hotels (Nancy was all for stretching out on the floor right there in the hallway). Erik made one last phone call to our landlady, and she answered! I have never been so relieved! We finished off the night with the bottle of champagne that Nancy and Daryl had bought, and fell asleep to the sounds of the music on the street.

Wait till you hear about our night....

Here's a teaser picture for you....try and guess what we did....

Ack! Long time no post...

Sorry about the lack of blogging...we've been kind of busy around here, for no particular reason.

Here are some highlights:

• We helped Zoe move yesterday from her awesome house in Villejuif to her even awesomer new apartment in the Marais. We ate dinner afterwards at L'As de Falafel, and Erik and I are officially jealous of her new neighbourhood. It's awesome. I have also decided that I am never moving with furniture again! I am still impressed at how awesome Zoe's move was. Her new place is on the 5th (so 6th for all you North Americans) floor of a super old building and there's no elevator. I thought it was going to be pretty bad, but the whole thing, from Villejuif to being finished was maybe two hours tops. We each took three trips up with stuff, and it was done! It wasn't nearly as hard as I was expecting it to be.
  
• Our building had a party on Tuesday night. I won't write too much about it because Erik took some pictures, and it really could be it's own post, but it was really nice to meet the other residents.
  
• We said goodbye to Hilary on Monday night. She is our Australian friend who was here studying French, and left on Tuesday to travel around Europe. We sent her off in good Canadian style with another well recieved pancake night. (Hilary lived in the apartment that Zoe moved into). At our pancake party we discovered that Hilary's (now Zoe's) roommate has done the Shikoku-no-michi! What a small world! Didn't get too much info from her because I was busy flipping pancakes, but I'm looking forward to finding out more, and now I REALLY want to do it!
• Zoe and I have been trying to figure out a way to keep Pam here all summer. And Alex and I are working on convincing Zoe to stay longer. It's hard to believe she's thinking about leaving in the fall!
• It was sooooo hot at the beginning of the week. It's when it gets above 30 that you really realize that NOTHING is air conditioned. I think I will be spending a lot of time in the frozen food section of the Inno...
  
• Only one more week of school! Woohoo!
  

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Does this make us European?

Tonight, we ate dinner at 10:45. We both really wanted to go to the gym, and the class I took ended at 9:30, but it wasn't like we could have eaten before either...we both got home around 7:30 and headed out almost right away. When we first got to Paris, it used to drive me nuts that dinner time was so late. Now I can't figure out how we could possibly eat any earlier. I think about going to the grocery store around 5:00 now, and we rarely eat before 8:00. It will be interesting to see what happens to these habits once we get back to Canada...

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Here come the visitors!

As I write this, Nancy and Daryl are on their way across the ocean to visit us! Can't wait to see them, and we are looking forward to visiting Champagne with them the last week in June.

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Alrighty, I think that's it for now. I have been horrible at responding to emails lately, and I apologize.

Mom, how are the parties going? How many days till you're free? I loved the photos that Rob sent, they look great!
Joan, thanks for the postcards and the pamphlet, they arrived today. And also thanks for the 10 month congratulations. Can you believe it's been almost a year?
Steve, guess what's coming to Paris in September???? Erik donned a scarf mawashi and stolled around Paris throwing salt into traffic circles when he found out....
Melissa, the pictures of Noah are too cute, and I can't believe you're moving!!
Karina, we loved looking at your pictures. When are you coming back???

Ok. Now I really need to go to sleep.

Hope everyone is well, we'll talk soon.
E+T

Website? Website!

After almost 10 months of neglect, the website is alive!

We've figured out enough to be able to post picture galleries - not much but it's a start. We'll keep adding pictures as we go, so check back occasionally to see what's new (follow the France link at the top of the page)

Let the procrastination begin!!!

Yup, it's that time of year again. The best part about being a teacher. I know you're all jealous....it's report card time! Woohoo!

I'm hoping to make a good dent in them tonight (wild and crazy Saturday night, here I come!), so for now, I'll leave you with an article that Erik just found.

The sky's the limit

Kind of scary. Makes me feel a wee bit guilty for all the travelling I want to do...

Hope everyone is having a nice weekend. The sun has finally come out here and it is H-O-T! Love it!

A-choo!

Well, it's been a bit of slow week around here.

Erik is officially sick, and even went to the doctor, and will hopefully write about that when he's feeling up to it. I'm feeling less than 100%, as a result of Pam, staff meetings, wild kids, report cards, and someone coughing through the night...

So, you haven't missed much, and I'm sorry we've been a bit out of touch.

It's finally nice out though! (nice enough for a 'mouvement sociale' by RATP on my metro lines today. After waiting 15 minutes on line 9 for my train, I walked home). Although I'm still carting my umbrella around, I'm almost ready to risk saying that it's summer...

Maybe it's not such a great holiday after all?

French split over former holiday?

(in a recent attempt to stay more up to date with the news, I've figured out how to get BBC and CBC articles sent directly to my inbox. Problem now is that I get about 50 updates per day from the BBC alone. I've got 130 right now to go through from the weekend. This was a highlight. Back to work [at least I have the day off...] )

Guess who's in town?

Flash Slideshow