Je suis ici!

We arrived in Paris on Wednesday and I am just now getting to enter this, my first blog entry from abroad... and it will be very short because this keyboard at my hotel is in French and the keys are not in the same places! And that's a really big deal when the "a" is in the wrong place because there are a lot of "a's" in English. Also, the comma isn't where it's supposed to be.

Ah. well. that's the beauty of international travel. Teaches us to be flexible.

France is, of course, incroyable... that is to say, incredible. Today we visited the Sacré-Coeur and I lit a candle for my friend Sheryl in her memory. Diane loved Montmartre where we walked the cobblestone streets along with a thousand other tourists, enjoyed the sunshine on the steps of Sacré-Coeur, ate ice cream in what was possibly the best ice cream shop in the world and had a glass of wine in an outside cafe, sitting admiringly across from the store where we had just bought a bag full of souvenirs. Then we ventured on to the Arc de Triomphe by Metro, having just bought a 2-day pass (we learned our lesson last night after having to sweet-talk our way into the station since we had no change and our credit cards wouldn't work). Got off two stops past the Charles de Gaulle stop where we should have gotten off and backtracked a bit, coming up the stairs to be knocked out by the view of both the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, which we visited yesterday.

So tonight we had dinner in a restaurant on the Champs-Elysées, a lovely repast of pasta and mostly people-watching. The people are amazing! Beautiful people--polite, genteel, patient with someone like me who brushed off her college French and can't resist using it. The waiter tonight took our photo and made sure he got the Champs-Elysées in the picture, too. In watching all the people, the women in particular, I vowed to Diane that when I come back home, I promise to take more fashion risks.