My Dad and Linda arrived in early April and stayed for 2 weeks. They had actually planned a side trip to Rome that coincidentally coincided with the Pope’s funeral. Since it was so crazy there, they did not go to the Vatican, but got to see many parts of Rome that we missed when we went with Ian. The first day that they were here we took them down to the boat ride on the Seine so they could get an idea of the layout of the city and hear some interesting facts from the tour guide on the boat. Next [View Full Entry]

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In late January I bought Vanessa an early birthday present - rollerblades. I bought some for myself too so we can go out and skate around Paris. They are pretty good ones so we should be able to use them when we get home (down at Mission Bay and at Lake Murray). Anyway, we bought them now since every Friday night they have a group skate through the streets of Paris with thousands of people. Vanessa has been using them as much as she can - except for when it is too cold / wet outside. Speaking of which, we were [View Full Entry]

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On Sunday the 16th of January, we finally got around to going out on the Christmas/Winter themed date that I won in a game of rummy. Actually, the activity which we choose as the focal point of our outing was one that we had been planning to do since before I even won the date. For our date, we went Ice skating on the Eiffel Tower. What an experience! This year was something like the first time in 50 years that the city of Paris has decided to construct an ice skating rink on the first floor of the Eiffel tower. [View Full Entry]

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New Years- We decided to join the crowds at the Arc de Triomph for the New Years Eve celebration. It was Crazy. The city organized a fireworks display on the Champs Elysees down towards the Place de la Concorde. The Ferris wheel was decked out with a huge Paris 2012 sign, and was the center of the display (Paris is in the candidature to host the Olympic Games). But, it is in reality March, I can tell you about the strategically placed complete shut down strike of the French transport system on the 9th of March- during the International Olympic Committee’s [View Full Entry]

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I love Christmas. I love Christmas trees, Christmas lights, Christmas carols, and Christmas food. It was certainly difficult to be away from our families, but Paris responded wonderfully to our need for Christmas type stuff to do. Around the 5th of December, the entire city started to put up all of their Christmas stuff, and I had a field day. All the local markets had decorations up; even the fish store had a blue Christmas arrangement. Around the city, about 13 temporary Christmas markets opened up. They were like our swap meets back home. You could buy gifts, food and there [View Full Entry]

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We took a trip up to Lucerne, Switzerland from the 17th to the 23rd of December. We figured it would be nice to be in a winter wonderland. We had a great time, saw a lot of beautiful things, and froze our butts off. Lucerne is a really neat little tourist town set by a lake in an absolutely breathtaking environment. Parts of the town date back to the 14th century, and have an absolutely medieval feel to them. Our first couple of days in Lucerne were spent looking around the town and enjoying the local sites. It was cold [View Full Entry]

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For the most part, November passed relatively quickly, and we worked a lot. My classes took up a ton of time; I had group meetings at least two or three times a week outside of class in addition to homework. Tyler was studying for his GMAT and getting application stuff together to apply to grad school. We were busy people. Luckily though that all paid off. I got 16 of my 30 required units finished, and my classes the second semester are a lot less time consuming. Also, Tyler got a really good score on the GMAT, and got in to [View Full Entry]

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Well, as October was coming to a close, my classes were becoming more demanding, and we started to settle into Parisian life. However, Halloween in one of my favorite holidays, and I did not want to totally miss out on it just because we were here in France. Luckily for us, Disneyland Paris had a Halloween themed month in October, and I was interested in seeing if the Disneyland over here measured up to the original southern California Park. It was a lot of fun. For the most part the parks are the same as each other, but there were some [View Full Entry]

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It’s funny how when you live in a city, it’s hard to imagine why people choose to come there on vacations. You sort of become accustomed to all the “sites” and forget to take the time to enjoy them. This is, believe it or not, even a little true for Paris. Maybe not as true as for someplace like San Diego, however, by the end of September, the only sites we had visited were those from my mandatory school field trips. Luckily for us, we have plenty of people coming to visit us over the course of the year. Our [View Full Entry]

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By this time, Lisa had been visiting for a little over a week, and I had started my courses at Dauphine. We spent the first 6 days of her visit looking around Paris (see following entry) but we decided to take a weekend trip over to London. We only had two days, so we ran around like crazy people trying to see all the major sites. Our first day was spent at Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and the London Eye. We actually decided to take buses around the city rather than the Tube for two reasons. 1.Compared to the Paris Metro, [View Full Entry]

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