One Month Escape

Day 8 to Day 15 : Moving over to La Défense

After staying at Villejuif, I’m moving in the north-western corner of Paris at a cousin’s place. The place isn’t as large as my last stay but I’ll oblige.

Tennis

My cousin has a court really close to his flat so we went every noons as he took some days off of work. I’m losing the match up in technicality but compensate with physical endurance.

The court is outside so we find some hard time warming up. In fact, the outside temperature doesn’t exceed a few degrees above 0°C... yeah, call me fool on this one =P

Anyway, it’s fun to play especially with someone I don’t see that oftenly. I’m amazed how much he progressed technically speaking whereas I remained almost at the same level. But, the lower height of the net gave me an overwhelming advantage in services, one of my best asset.

Lots of fun there, glad I brought my racket along.

Geek Stuff

We’re both computer sciences engineers so we’re both geeks. Moreover, now that we both earn our lives, we now have enough money to buy more geeky stuff, hence becoming upgraded super-geeks.

This shiny new laptop had been teasing me for too long >=)

Put 2 geeks with 2 comps, 1 connection to the net and 1 network cable and they’ll be occupied for at least one week... That’s what happened as soon as I got my hands on my new laptop. The only fresh air we had was to get some food and drinks at the convenient store facing the building...

Celebrations

As Christmas was approaching, we still didn’t decide ourselves on a menu for Xmas’ Eve... We met up at Auchan (supermarket) at 5:30PM the 24th of December when it was closing at 6PM and we picked up whatever seemed good enough for a party meal :
 Foie Gras
 Stuffed Turkey with Mushrooms and Wine
 Chocolate
 Soft drinks (we’re not heavy drinkers)

For present I sneaked out of the flat to get my cousin a new mouse for his computer (geek stuff rulz !). He was really pleased with it.

Day 16 to Day 23 : Cold outside + Warm inside = Ultimate Idle Combo

The next week I’m still at my cousin’s place at La Défense but he’s gotta work for a few days before taking another long week-end off for New Year’s Eve.

Extreme Tennis

As I was saying before the temperature was really low and it started snowing around Xmas. The snow actually stayed a while longer, making it difficult to go on the court. But one day, we braved the cold and icy weather for a short session.

After swaying away the snow that overlaped a small portion of the court, we started playing. None of us managed to fall into the small pack of snow while playing but it was indeed fun.

More Geeky Stuff

As soon as he got some times off, we went back to our underground geeky activities that consumed our very souls =)

Celebrations

The new year’s eve was spent in simple way : good food, some TV shows and friendly discussion over the night until dawn. For food, we had salmon, chicken with its olive sauce and some chocolates as desert.

There was some fireworks outside when midnight threw us into year 2009 but nothing too noisy. We didn’t even hear the sound of honking cars.

Day 24 to Day 31 : Rushing into departure

The few days after that were spent running different errands all over the shopping mall. Everyday had its surge of adrenaline running from shop to shop in order to get everything that was on my wishing list.

I still found some time to meet up with friends and to spend some time around Paris. As the depart got closer I started to have that strange feeling in my guts : after all there was a lot of things and important people I left behind me here 18 months ago.

After over 3 weeks, my trip has finally come to an end. All that was scheduled was done, and even some things that weren’t scheduled had been done. It’s now time for me to go back to Tahiti and to resynch in order to go back to teaching.

Funny things on the flight :

 I asked if I could get some seat near the alley instead of the window but of course, there was no more places at the time I registered. I’ll always remember the smile the office lady gave me when saying "I can’t find any one sir" because I had some bigger smile on my face when I discovered the flight wasn’t full and there were plenty of available seats around the alley.

 Since there was so many open seats, I was asked if I could switch with some people in order to reunite their family on a 4 seats row. I was asked this on both parts of the flight but by 2 different families. I gladly obliged and got 2 seats for myself for 24h, which is REALLY convenient.

 The music playlist contained a song played by someone I know, let’s name her E. for privacy matters. It was really a strange feeling to see a song by someone you’ve been close to in this situation. I kept looking for the song and heard it quite a number of times. It’s not that bad but I couldn’t recognize the person I knew. There was this distance in her voice that I’m not familiar with, or maybe it was just I wasn’t in good hearing conditions (you know, the humming of the reactors and such).

 I had some pleasure catching some hours of sleep. The stay was nice but in the late days, I was somehow always in a rush. I just couldn’t find the strength to follow my schedule and sleep during the 1st part (up to L.A.) and stay awake during the 2nd part of the flight.

24h later, I was back on a Thursday night but it was still as hot as ever. Didn’t manage to have some decent sleep with mosquitoes combined to the heat. The next few days were spent unpacking and resting since Monday will sent me back to work...

Next update for this article : Upload some pictures !