Bon (?) Voyage

I am heartily sick of traveling. Not only was it a 24 hour trip, but also somewhere stuck in there are seven more hours. Just to make it longer. Let's start off at the beginning: flight to Chicago was fine, and I only had my laptop on for 90 min (this is important later) and I managed to pretty well keep myself awake. Then commences the 8 hour flight to London. This was a long, spacious flight. I was told by my mother to sleep right after dinner. Obediently, I wait through my sleepiness for dinner to come and start watching some movie. Dinner was an hour late in coming, but it wasn't too bad. After dinner, I finished the last 30 minutes of my movie, and then I spent five hours, FIVE hours trying various poses, various songs in my head, various actions to make myself fall asleep. Nothing. Just sitting there thinking of how much I needed to, checking my clock to see what time it was at home, and laying there in a bored, long, frustrasted manner. Upon arrival at London, we waited a full half an hour after "docking" because the walkway thing they had was new and didn't work so they spent 30 minutes trying to fix it instead of getting us off there. I wonder if anyone missed any flights?

So we got the old fashioned stairs down, and upon exciting the plane, my first thought was, "Mom didn't warn me it was so HUMID!" It was humid. And I was tired, and hungry, and the whole driving on the left was weird. In London, thought, you meet lots of people with British accents. Somehow I always associated it with old, gray haired women. Not so. And there were the cute Middle Eastern guys with turbans on and I thought, "This is something I woulndn't go to DIA expecting to see." Also, they won't post your gate information (except for your terminal) in London until approximately one hour before your flight, so I didn't know where to sit, and things are in pounds, US dollars, AND Euros and I was basically confused. And so in my 3.5 hour layover I couldn't sleep through since I didn't know where to wait, I turned on my lappy (which has a 4 hour battery, well, 4-5 depending on what I'm doing) but it said I only had 9 minutes left! Sigh.

Arrival in Paris, customs is a joke (they take your passport and immediately hand it back without looking at it and you're done), and I couldn't find anyone I was supposed to meet since there IS no baggage carousel one. Finally we found one and after waiting for an hour we decided the other girl left us so we got a taxi. Which dropped us off at the wrong Etap Hotel. And left before we knew it was wrong. So we got to walk two miles in the hot hot sun on my sore feet carrying/rolling baggage and speaking French/English to a stranger in my group.

But I'm here! And I got to go see Notre Dame today but I have a huge blister which distracted me and we got lost on the Metro and I really don't think this is the language they taught me at school. So the summary is I'm tired, hungry, disoriented, and incomprehensible. The taxi driver did say, when I said I spoke "un peu francais" that I actually spoke "un peu BIEN francais!" So!