So this one time I went to Paris and everyone was on Strike

I'm not really sure where to start with this!

Paris was awesome, and exhausting. I walked a crazy amount. I saw a lot of tourist-y things. The weather was sunny and the patisseries were plentiful. Here was the deal with the strike: when we checked into the hotel on Wednesday, the desk man told us that the metro would be shut on Thursday. That was okay, because we were planning on just walking anyway. We went to the Palais Garnier on Thursday night because La Traviata was playing, and if you go an hour early sometimes they have leftover opera tickets. The opera was cancelled because of the strike. The next morning, we tried to take a bus to Versailles. The bus service was cancelled because of the strike, so Versailles was out. We went to the Musee d'Orsay instead, which was really cool. The second floor was closed (you can guess why). We went to the Louvre that night. The top floor was closed; not that it would have really mattered, since it would have taken about 3 days to see everything there anyway.

I do sympathize with the people on strike--I think they were doing it to keep their existing pension benefits. So I hope something comes of it. And in the case of museum workers, well, I might be one of them doing that one day! I'm a little disappointed that I couldn't go to Versailles, but it'll just give me something to plan to do another time. It makes for a good story. And those of you that know me know that my life often has farcical elements to it, so it kind of makes sense that there would be a major transportation strike on the two days that I go somewhere.

The French people were, on the whole, really nice. My French is not great (okay, it's pretty bad) but as long as you tried, they appreciated it. A lot of the time, they'd say what I'd said back to me in French, and make me "repete". I'm okay with listening to it, like in the EuroStar station I could figure out what the people on the loudspeaker were saying. I also know enough to read museum signs, which was helpful.

Getting back to England was interesting as well. We had an hour and a half to get from Waterloo (where the EuroStar arrives) to Liverpool St. where the Norwich train departs. I don't know if we were just tired or what, but we got on the Westbound loop of our tube line instead of the Eastbound. We saw that it looped around, so we just decided to stay on since we had enough time. Big mistake. The tube line stopped about 5 stops before it was supposed to, because of track construction. We had to take about 3 different lines, the final one being severely delayed due to an earlier problem. People were so packed on it, it was actually hard to breathe. A similar thing happened on the Paris Metro, but this was even worse. I'm not claustrophobic or anything, but when I got off I never wanted to go on public transport again. We missed our train back to Norwich by 5 minutes, and had to wait an hour for the next one. I got back here in the early hours this morning.

I'll keep doing posts, because I have a lot of pictures to put up and it's going to take me awhile to process everything! I am used to coming back from a vacation and going home, so it's kind of weird to be back here, since it's almost like I'm on vacation here too.