First post to the new blog & Day 1 in Paris!

Good morning from Paris! As I mentioned on my other blog, I've had The Olsens blog name reserved for a while, knowing that we would probably want a family blog someday, when we had more time on our hands to update people on our (oh-so-interesting) lives. A (mostly) completed Master's degree & trip to Paris seemed like a perfect time to begin. During our trip, Trevor & I will be posting pictures and updates of our escapades. And after our trip...well let's not think about that yet. We've only just started it!

So we arrived in Paris yesterday around 11:15 AM (French time). The flight was pretty unremarkable, except that right after taking off from NYC (the second leg of the flight), we heard a strange noise followed by the sound of liquid streaming out of the plane. That was kind of disconcerting to hear right before flying over the Atlantic, and after a series of horrible plane crash stories in the news. But, the captain came on over the loudspeaker and sounded calm & pleasant, so I calmed down, and the rest of the flight went off without a hitch.

One way I like to entertain myself on the long plane ride to France is by confusing the flight attendants. I think they receive training on memorizing which language each passenger in their service area speaks. If the flight attendant is bilingual, he or she will switch between languages depending on which passenger they are addressing. It's quite impressive, really. Well when they get to me, they usually try English first. And that works. Then sometimes they try French, just to be sure. Well that works too. So then they decide that I must be a French person who took a lot of years of English classes in school (like all French people my age, since it's a high school graduation requirement). So they stick with French. Poor Trevor gets lumped in with me, so they speak to him in French too. And that works for a while. He gives them one word answers, and they don't notice. But finally, a question comes up that is longer than one word, and Trevor responds in English (although he's entirely capable of responding in French). Then the flight attendants try to hide their confusion and decide that we're impostors and speak to both of us in English for the rest of the trip.

Anyway...after the long trip, we decided to save about 40 Euros by taking the train into Paris rather than taking a taxi. We were excited to find out, after having gotten on the train, that it was going directly to Paris without stopping along the way. That cut a bunch of time and we were at the St-Michel stop in no time. After one switch to the 10 metro line, we arrived at Duroc, got off, and walked the last couple of blocks to the apartment.

We kept ourselves busy, fighting off the urge to curl up and fall asleep, by unpacking, doing some cleaning, going grocery shopping and having an early dinner.

This is me fighting off sleep in the living room:

Here are some of the things we brought back from our food-shopping excursion:

Kiri, Camembert, Kiwi-flavored yogurt, fresh eggs, & le Viennois Cafe!

Dessert!

We ended up doing pretty well and managed to stay awake until 9:30pm. We both woke up at 2am, hoping it was already 5 or 6am, but fell back asleep until a respectable 7am (for me) and 8am (for Trevor). This morning, I decided to take some pictures of the apartment and the views from the apartment to share.

The Dining Room:

View from the kitchen:

Close-up of the Ministere de la France d'Outre-Mer: