Aaron Around The World - White stuff and ice stuff

Shortest day of the year today in the northern hemisphere (or yesterday - one or the other), and it's Christmas on Saturday already! I'm heading back through to London on Friday, spending Christmas with the mates and staying put that week, doing the New Year's thing in London and then its back to Paris from January 2nd for the foreseeable future :) Obviously it would have been nice to get away for New Year's, but after all the travel this year my annual leave has been well and truly used up!

In other news, after returning home to Texas not even three weeks ago, Kristina is coming back hahaha! Long story short, she does freelance swim coaching over the summer, and we've made some pretty awesome travel plans starting next September which I'll bang on about later. In the meantime she was planning to find some sort of random work to see her through until summer, but figured she could do that over here too seeing as I'm here hehe - good plan! The only problem is she won't have a work visa which will make job hunting slightly harder but by no means impossible. So anyway she just booked her flight tonight and is touching down in London on the 30th in time for New Year's! :)

Ho ho ho!


View from the Grande Arche in La Défense (where I'm working) this morning.				And the view from the 24th floor of my building - white!


Last week the La Défense Christmas markets opened for all the local business folk to do their Christmas shopping during the lunch hour hehe. There is the usual odds and ends available as well as some other random stuff (including massage chairs) but unlike those in Reims yesterday these ones have sausage! :)


My first French concert! Special ;) This is Casino de Paris, apparently one of the well-known music halls of Paris with a history dating back to the 18th century. Despite the name, it is not nor ever been a casino, hmm.		The supporting act was this tartan temptress, with a hair style suggesting she'd been dragged behind a car. Good voice on her though.


The main act was Nouvelle Vague (French for 'new wave'). The show started out with these two honeys displaying undertones of lesbianism...				...which made it easy to spot the homosexual males in the crowd (i.e. those more interested in their phones).


Eventually some other randoms came on stage for a song or two before disappearing again.		Turns out there are quite a few of them. Nouvelle Vague perform covers of 'punk rock' tracks from artists including The Clash, Blondie, The Sex Pistols, The Police, and even Billy Idol. Keeping with the lesbian theme, two of them very nearly made out at the end there. The dude beside them looks as though he's been waiting for this moment for a long time hehe.

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It's still coming down (albeit rather slowly). Not expecting this sort of weather quite so soon, I don't have my off-road tyres for the bike here with me, so it's been a nice slippery day on the slick road tyres hehe - only two near-misses with the rear-end of cars ;)


Good to know - we were only there a month ago! Story here...


After a clear and dry ride to work on the bike this morning, the heavens opened up in time for lunch and dumped the white stuff on us. Within an hour, this is how it was looking :) When the time came for me to ride home again tonight it had turned into hail, and hurt like fuck.


This weather is weird. Most of yesterday's snow melted away overnight and there was little of it left this morning, but again in time for lunch it started hiffing it down again.		That's me on the left sliding through it hehe.		Good fun!


By evening it had become well compacted on the roads, essentially turning it into ice. This guy lost it behind me while going around the chaos that is the Arc de Triomphe roundabout, and limped away with his scooter. I managed to stay on two wheels for all of the 11km-ride home but saw many a pedestrian fail to stay on two feet - at least one chick I saw must have a broken ass right now hahaha!		And check out who I saw on the way home, speaking the most fluent French you've ever heard - impressive. I did always wonder as a kid how Santa deals with the multilingual aspect of his job, just like I wondered how his reindeer fly.


Meanwhile it's all happening in London, and I'm bloody missing out on it! The government today won a vote in parliament to raise university fees three-fold, and that resulted in a lot of pissed-off students taking to the streets around parliament and smashing the place up - full story here. I'm back in London on Saturday so I'll go check out the aftermath but I dare say I've missed the best of it hehe - love a good riot ;)


I love going to my little local Parisian supermarket here.		For me, this is what a red pepper (or capsicum if you're a Kiwi) should look like: a nice deep red, round and plump...		This is what we get - these sorry miserable squashed things.


You never know when you might need to top up your oestrogen levels ;)		And there's no shortage of ham in the supermarkets here. Ham, ham, ham, but no bacon, anywhere. Jambon as far as the eye can see but no bacon :(		The same with cheese. I just want a normal block of cheese. I don't want this fancy stuff. Can't a guy just get some cheddar?! Now that I think about it, I hate the damn supermarket.


One coffin-like suitcase, one cabin-baggage case, one backpacking pack, one rucksack - and that's my shit packed! While I'm back in London next week I lose my apartment here so half of my stuff is getting put into storage, and the other half will have to come back to London with me (only to be brought back through again eight days later). Pain in the ass!		As for the bike, well that'll be getting locked up in the car park at work for the week as I've got nowhere else to put it. I've got too much crap to take it with me to London, the apartment complex don't want it here (and I don't want to leave it here), locking it up to a lamppost out on the street is only a good idea if I want it vandalised and violated, and I haven't exactly asked security if it's ok to leave it in the car park but that way they can't say no either :)		While clearing out the fridge I realised I've got quite a collection of uneaten desserts hehe, and I don't want to throw them out so I've been gorging on them all night. Anyway, Merry Christmas and happy New Year Paris, I'm back again January 2nd :) Over to the London pages...


The view from the Grande Arche in La Défense this morning - basically just one great outdoor ice rink. Apparently we got 11cm of snow yesterday - the most Paris has ever had in a single day since 1987. The skies cleared overnight so that 11cm basically just turned to ice, and to my bewilderment it appears that none of the city's roads were salted or gritted to deal with it. That being the case, they too were like ice rinks, and I had really fun ride to work this morning hehe.


The courtyard of the Louvre at 9am this morning: fucking cold, and yet there was still a long queue wanting to get in there. The shot on the right is looking along the Champs-Élysées, also fucking cold ;) I know I've been banging on about the weather for ages now, but this is apparently the worst bout of it Europe has seen in decades and its pretty exciting and chaotic stuff hehe. I wasn't aware before I set out for work on the bike this morning that the roads were nothing but slush, and I probably should've bailed but before long I couldn't really get much wetter and so carried on. 11kms later when I made it to the car park beneath work the front of my bike had ice starting to form all over it and my fingers were completely numb - damn it was cold hahaha! Oh well, only six more months until summer.


Every time I travel between London and Paris on the Eurostar, I acquire points akin to frequent flier miles. I've mentioned this before when I redeemed some of those points for free tickets to Disneyland Paris for Kristina and I a while back. Anyway, once you've accumulated a certain amount of points, you get given what they call a 'Carte Blanche', and this entitles me (among other things) access to the business lounge in any Eurostar terminal, normally only available to those who purchase Eurostar's 'Business Premiere' tickets (which obviously I don't). And here it is in Paris Gare du Nord. Comfy seats for my business ass, free Wi-Fi for my extremely important business needs (like updating my website), and a free and open bar for my business drinking problem. Happy days!