paris is crap

before i dive right in, a huge mahalo (yes i've been watching the lance vs lieto race too!) to everyone for the comments and emails and calls and all. its a heck of a lot easier to pick yourself up when you have a few helping hands.

OK now on to the good stuff. so yes i end up in paris twice a year. sounds like a dream right? sometimes i wish it were so i could wake up and think, man i still have 2 hours left to sleep...

not sure where to begin. but my main purpose in going is to staff and manage one and a half shows. hmmmm so now you're thinking - show in paris? must be Chanel or LV or some other "devil wears prada" couture kind of thing. on the contrary. tradeshows. cotton. riveting.

here is the fruit of my labor. premiere vision its called. which i believe would roughly translate to the "first vision" but thats me and my crappy french.

so here we spend 9 hours a day. well here or the other show - thats the half i was talking about. there is another booth a hop, skip away where yes we talk about cotton. the wonder fiber. mainly we try to convince them that they can not buy anything from us, that all those packages with our logo, we dont make them. sometimes i give up and just randomly grab someone's business card and say "email me"... ha. ok i dont do that....

right..back to the torture. confinement, though not solitary, sometimes depending on the accompanying staff you wish it was..

so to kind of rehash the day, it goes something like this.

wake up at 600 (ok mind you thats not terribly early for most. and i can already hear the "i'm up at 5 every day anyway". ok i get it. ) its dark and cold. and most likely i have woken up about 3 am unable to go back to sleep until about 5...stupid jet lag... its blowing a bone chilling wind and the only life are the poor garbage men who have on about 600 layers of goretex. but off i trudge. thru the streets (unclean and a bit icy) of not fun paris. during the september show i sometimes run along the Seine, but during feb - hell no. that wind coming off the river is brutal. so i just wind my way up and down some main streets and maybe a few laps around the park that has yet to open...here it is on the weekends when i can actually run thru it. a nice 1.25 mile loop...
back to the hotel to shower and put on big girl clothes (ie business casual, non - cotton clothes... ummm dont you work for a company that has cotton in the name... yep... makes a ton of sense... anyhooo).. and head down to breakfast.

breakfast. french breakfast. unspecified meat and cheese. baguettes. yogurt. some odd fruit concoction. i decide to order eggs since well i'm HUNGRY! the waitress (keep in mind we stay in a very small hotel so its kind of like someone's kitchen you are eating in) comes over and i say "du oeufs, si vous plat" in my best attempt at french. she looks at me quizzically at first so i repeat, thinking english might be better, "2 eggs please". she then has this expression as if i've just told her the Eiffel tower is a rusted piece of junk... and says back to me "2 eggs... 1 person?????" with out hesitating i reply, in my most southern, redneck, american voice. "YEP". like i said i'm hungry damn it! NOTE- there is nutella at breakfast. i choose to ignore it. though it does call out to me, answering would be disaster.

so off we go. we do get a glimpse of the eiffel tower. seen here.. its that tall blurry thing off in the distance...


and then we all climb onto a train, cramming ourselves in, mostly at the urging of others who often use their very large pieces of luggage to rearrange other passengers and spend about an hour trying to keep our faces out of other's armpits and our legs from going numb due to the awkward balancing act.


this photo is actually getting the train coming home. and yes everyone is getting on the same train. i tried to take some photos on the train, but its really hard to root around in your bag when your arms are pinned to your sides. and to be quite honest there are some folks on the train who would not take so kindly to having their photos taken, and frankly i wasnt looking for trouble. ha.

once we reach our destination station its only a short bus ride to the show. along with 1000 of our friends...



yep another "getting to know you" ride.

phew! is it lunch time yet? yep. YUM! time for my first of 5 straight tuna baguettes. why not some variety to add some spice? quite simple. there is none. poulet, jambon or thon. i believe in my 8 days there if you lined up end to end all the bread i consumed, it would be farther than i could swim in 8 minutes.

cause i know you were dying to see it!


i will make mention very quickly of the bathroom scene. normally there are signs posted in each telling people not to stand on the commode... yep lots of asians attend these shows. and well while there were no signs this time for me to capture for your enjoyment, i will tell you that at one point i went in and there were 2 ladies bathing at the sink. think about it. i did and walked out.

so after a most rewarding day answering some pretty lame questions its time to scare up some dinner. now, having been to paris 6 times, i have yet to have the quintessential amazing french meal . kind of tough to do on a corporate budget. we've had bits and pieces.. an amazing vanilla creme brule, baked salmon that just melts, even a savory crepe filled with mushrooms, tomatoes and onion that was truly wonderful, there is never a start to finish experience. and stuffing your face with bread cause you havent eaten in 7 hours tends to put a damper on your taste receptors... well that and the bottle of wine...

and then we head home, errr....back to the hotel, muster up the stregnth to address the emails from the day, realizing that with the time change the east coast is still live and well wanting things. bad. very bad. i did try to watch the batchelor on abc.com one night and was basically told i was a terrorist with a non-us computer trying to gain trade secrets. ummm WTF. are you serious?

and just like ground hog day, we morph into bill murray. facing the same fate for five straight days.

i do try to swim when i'm there. and you may remember my rant on the french pool...


my lovely recount of it can be found here:
http://runningyankee.blogspot.com/2009/02/city-of-coke-lights-peaux-and-wall.html

(ok so i dont know how to do the fancy links.. anyone???)

BUT in all seriousness. there has to be a silver lining in all of this. and we do our darndest to try to find the light spots. here are a few of my favorites:

this is "armenia" as we now call it. a little hole in the wall place that we go to each time we are there. the owner knows us. 3 shows ago her husband sang happy birthday to me while playing the key board..... in 7 different languages. cute. cute till about the fourth one when we were thinking...ummm when is he gonig to stop? but the food is good. simple. light.


i guess it wouldnt be paris if you didnt see some fashion:


some little girls in the park.


and well even if you arent a pirate there are still good things to hunt for:


and it turns out the five dollar foot long is available here too, just slightly more expensive:


and this is horrible... but remember on the office when they played lingo bingo? well we kind of did the same thing.. but well, we changed the game a bit...see when you travel with someone who well quite frankly annoys the crap out of everyone else you find ways to deal...


and it snowed, which was a pain in the ass during the day but somehow at night looked kind of pretty. im in a pretty good mood here cause we just had fantastic crepes!


view from the hotel room - thats the pantheon.


so anyway, thats paris