Movin' Day!

Tomorrow is Movin' Day, or rather the past few days have been moving days. So, we're busy with all of that and Alice still has a long commute to Zurich for another day. We're leaving Muttenz and the Basel area for Thalwil. We'll miss many things about living near Basel, especially grocery shopping in France, and all our friends in the area.

I need to finish up writing about the trip to Paris, and in the meantime, I've also taken a trip to the Cinque Terre in Italy.

Paris (Days 1 and 2)

From Paris-Vernon

You may have heard that there is now a TGV high-speed train that goes from Basel to Paris. It now takes 3-1/2 hours for the trip. That's pretty fast. Before last week, it took 5 hours.

We took our trip before last week. Yet, travel across the French countryside is anything but tedious. We quite enjoyed the views of the countryside as we wound through Belfort and Troyes before we arrived in Paris at the Paris-Est, or Paris-East train station. We hopped onto the Metro and the RER and arrived at our hotel, which was the perfect hotel for Paris as we were hardly in our room, just to sleep. The hotel was very near the beautiful Luxembourg Gardens, and just inside the Latin Quarter. Our first day in Paris, we just wandered around a bit. It was Sunday and many things were closed. We wandered over to the Musee d'Orsay to look at the building and then found a coffee shop. Then we walked along the river to Notre Dame and found dinner nearby.

Monday we headed over to check out the Louvre. We spent pretty much the entire day there. We saw the Mona Lisa, Napoleon's Throne, The Raft of the Medusa and the Crowning of Napoleon. It's an amazing museum, but it's very big. Eventually, we were worn out looking at art so we headed out and walked towards the Arc d'Triomphe.
On the way we picked up our train tickets for the next day's trip out of town and we walked down the Champs d'Elysees. We only did a little shopping along the way. At the end of the walk we went to the Arc. It was about 6:30pm, so we saw the relighting of the unknown soldier's ceremonial flame.

From Paris-Vernon

From Paris-Vernon

We took the Metro back to the Latin Quarter to check out the Mexican restaurant we had seen on our way back to our hotel the night before, but it was, unfortunately, closed. We wandered around and found a sidewalk brasserie that was good on a side-street. Then we went over and relaxed in the Luxembourg Gardens until 9PM when the police chase everyone out with their shrieking whistles. Okay, they just toot on the whistles and mention that it's time for the park to close, and the guards at the gates wish you a good evening as you walk past....

From Paris-Vernon

Been doing a bit of traveling

We've been traveling around a lot lately. When things settle down a bit more in the next couple of days I'll write a few entries. Here's a picture of me in 'My Town' ;-)

Alsatian Adventures

We've been out wandering around Alsace the past couple of days. Had a tasty dinner, saw some nice castles. We found out that Hohlandsburg doesn't open for another week.

From Alsace April 07

The three castles over Eguisheim seem to have been closed to visitors for quite some time, but you can still have a good look at them.

From Alsace April 07

Video: Bruno Giussani

Bruno's video is finally available. This was my first time posting something to Google Video, and while it is available, I think I might look into tweaking a few more things. Like the size and quality of the video, for example.

Bruno Giussani's presentation about the Bondy Blog at BlogCampSwitzerland 2007. The Bondy Blog is a blog originally created to cover the unrest outside Paris in 2005. After the unrest had subsided, the blog was turned over to local young adults to write. It has since become quite a success in France.

The video can be downloaded now and is 54 minutes long. Enjoy!

(edit: Dyslexia strikes! Sorry about the misspelling Bruno, your name is now correct)