Paris #1 - On the road again

So this is really more of a teaser post than anything meaningful. Bienvenue to the Paris photo album, though! For anyone out of the loop (or the internet historian dissecting countless blog posts in the future to discover a frighteningly pro-lolcat and grammatically inept pseudohistory), Alyssa and I hopped a jet to Paris for a week; meeting my fmaily there for lots of general sightseeing, seeing eachother, and holiday/New Year celebrations in the "City of Lights" Enjoy

A UK gift shop in Heathrow airport with their own life-size Beafeater mannequin. It hasn't taken long for British gift shops to lose some of their mystique for us; we recognize them now to be just as tacky as Canadian gift shops back home. Not, however, to say that we won't probably bring lots of tacky junk home with us just the same.

Us in Heathrow. Contrary to popular opinion, I actually do go to these places with Alyssa, even if she's usually the only one in the picture.

Like this one. We hopped an RER train from Charles de Gaulle airport which took us right through the heart of Paris before depositing us in the suburb-y area our hotel was hiding in on the other side.

The Paris RER map. One interesting difference between the Paris and London metro systems is that pretty much all of "Paris" proper is in zone 1. Consequently, tube-ing it in Paris is actually quite inexpensive. The RER can be seen as the rough equivalent of the UK National Rail trains which run all over outside the city and even all over the country. Or GO and VIA back home, though drawing any comparisons between this map and GO seems a tad unfair.

Sadly, we didn't really see anything at all our first day other than our hotel. But we were tired so we didn't mind. Stay tuned!