1 to 5 June 2016
This week and weekend was pretty uneventful. We stayed in Paris, but as the weather reports around the world have been saying, there has been a lot of rain.
On Friday, with the flooding on the river, my train I take to work was cancelled (RER C) on this side of the river because in central Paris it runs directly along the river. So my 20 minute commute turned into 1 hour, 20 minutes, with lots of walking (at least it wasn’t raining). What a pain in the butt. At least it was because of the flooding and not a strike this time. The worst part was, the metros were so over crowded because of the cancelling of the RER C. I know now why the personal space bubble is much smaller in Europe. I also had to ‘train surf’, which for those of you never to have this wonderful experience is when you are so packed in with people, you can not hold onto anything, so you are going along for the ride bumping into the people around you. At least it is Friday and hopefully the RER C will be back up and running on Monday.
For Friday we decided to stay in for dinner because we had extra food. We decided to start watching a BBC show called Peaky Blinders (thanks to the recommendation from my sister Jen). We are hooked.
We slept in Saturday and then headed to the market to do our shopping for the week. Since we are heading to Bordeaux this weekend, it was a smaller order.
After bringing the groceries home, we set out to the home improvements (Castorama) store to look for items we need at the house. Nothing crazy, just some odds and ends. In stead of taking the Metro over the river, we decided to walk to see how high the river is from the flooding (I had not had a chance to walk down during the week. Holy cow. The river is a little over 6 meters (about 18 feet) above where it was before the rain started. See how close the water is to the bottom of this bridge.
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| Flooding of the Seine |
We then basically ran errands for the rest of the day Saturday. Nothing crazy. We came home and decided to have dinner in (still had food to eat) and to watch more Peaky Blinders. Since we knew we were not going out, we stopped and got a Bordeaux from Saint-Emilion at the booze shop (Nicholas). Unlike PA, you can get booze just about anywhere. But at Nicholas, they specialize in wine and alcohol. Highly recommend going here if you want a bottle of really good wine that cost more than 10 euros.
On Sunday, we headed out to the Marais, which is one of the few places in the city that is allowed (by law) to be open on Sundays. It has a young, hip vibe and tons of falafel shops (with very long lines). We wondered through the streets and ended up in a covered market with the theme of ‘Vintage Summer,’
We then headed over to the Champs-Elysees, as it is closed for pedestrians only on Sundays. There was also a biking fund raiser. It was a great way to get people out and raise money. They also had a food truck plaza. It smelled so good.
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| Food trucks |
We then headed home to book some travel and get ready for the week. I have to say laundry is a pain. We only have a washer so everything has to be air dried and with the rain, the air is saturated so our stuff takes forever to dry. Ugh.
– Kasey
Step Count: Saturday: 16,109, 10.72 km Sunday: 13,824, 10.09 km
Le tour de walker 