A longer post

Well, it certainly is easier to type on a familiar keyboard. My last post took an awfully long time to write so I didn't get much time to talk about what had gone on over the weekend.

The move was rather hectic. Basically I managed to not rent a car for the day, meaning we had no transport to move our stuff out of the flat and into the new one. Luckily we managed to find a "“man with a van"” at short notice. He was a really nice guy from Shrilanka and we had a good chat on the way over. Being short notice, we could only get him at the last minute so there wasn't much time to co-ordinate switching over.

He didn't help with lifting the bags (he had an injury that prevented it, he told me that if we had needed that, he would have brought someone else) so I had to rush up and down the stairs hefting the bags down. This was made especially fun by the fact that there was painting work going on in the stairwell of the apartment, so there was dust and painting equipment everywhere.

Hefting the bags past all this was a rather difficult task. I spent most of it on the verge of plunging down the stairs. The weight of the bags didn't help either. Annmarie and I have both agreed that next time we travel, we really need to lower the amount of stuff we bring with us.

Unfortunately due to the lack of time, after loading up the van and driving over to the new flat there was still quite a bit of stuff still back at the first flat. I knew there was some still there, but I didn't realise quite how much. So the final inspection ran through with no immediate worries (that may appear when I get the final notice from the rental company) but then I, having gone on my own to return the keys, was stuck with rather too much luggage to carry around. I met up with Annmarie and we made our way back to the new flat.

After that, we didn't really have much enegry for doing much else, so we just wandered round looking for dinner, which we eventually had in a Quick burger restaurant. They are a local French company that runs a MacDonalds esque burger chain. Not too bad, better for salads and they have a nice fish burger.

The next day we didn't really feel like doing much at all. We just planned to go out and get some groceries to stock up on for the week. While wandering around we thought we'd hang out in a park for a bit. Unfortunately all the parks had been locked up. We didn't think this was usual Saturday behaviour in Paris so when we spotted a caretaker in one of the parks, I asked why the park was closed. This went kinda along the lines of:

"Pardon monsieur, le parc est ferme?"

"Oui, tout est ferme aujourd'hui."

"Pourquoi monsieur?"

"Parce-que (something something something) trop vent."

... (me thinking) "Ah, vent. D'accord, merci monsieur."

So I got that it was too windy. Didn't understand most of the rest of that sentence, but the end bit was enough. So we had the picnic lunch we had bought on a bench just outside a park and then wandered round a bit more till we found a little supermarche.

The Sunday was rather interesting too, but I'll write about that later, and post pictures. I've been writing more job application emails at the moment, and I'm a bit out of time. I also have a hair cut appointment to get to. Tomorrow we are hoping to get to the Musee d'Orsay to see an exhibition of Cezanne and Pissarro. I've messed up a couple of our attempts (including today) so we have to make an extra effort tomorrow as the exhibition ends this week.