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Published: September 1st 2008
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We arrived in Heathrow, for some reason when we arranged our round the world ticket we had asked to arrive in London so that we could spend some time there before travelling to France, well things changed and Owen bought tickets to the Blizzard Convention which was in Paris the next day (Saturday), so after going through immigration and picking up our bags we had to check them back in and wait for our flight to Paris. By this stage I was not so much a fan of airports planes or anything that resembled them. Our flight to Paris was short and uneventful but when we arrived we had Monique and Maxime (my mum’s cousin and her son) waiting right outside the arrival gates for us. I think if Monique were any further in security would have tried to take her away. It was great to see them both and we couldn’t wait to see Paris and spend some time relaxing with the family.
They had arranged for us to stay with Maxime and his girlfriend Emilie, Maxime speaks fairly good English and he is not working so it worked very well for us. We arrived at Maxime’s house and
had a BBQ dinner, Monique and her husband Claude are very funny, Owen learnt some new French words, “Cadavre” which means corpse and is what Claude calls the empty wine bottle and “Bier” which is beer. We had an early night ready to get up early and go to the blizzard convention.
Ok so Owen being the computer gaming freak that he is couldn’t wait to get to Blizzcon, it was like watching a little kid on Christmas morning, for me it was just a laugh to watch so many people so excited about keyboards and dress ups. Essentially our next two days were spent queuing for a preview gaming session or for food. After around 1 hour of queuing for the yet to be released expansion of World of Warcraft I decided to jump into the lunch bar queue as it seemed to be moving faster than the one we were currently in. After Owen queued for another ½ hour the staff finally decided to tell him that they were having technical difficulties and all of the computers were down, which left me in my queue for food, it was about an hour before the staff came and
told us they had run out of sandwiches and we could either come back in an hour or stay in line and wait for the next delivery. As it turned out the guy behind me spoke English and so we got to chatting while we waited and he translated for me, we both refused to get out of the line as we were only around 20 people away from the front of the queue. Luckily the delivery came in the next 20 mins and by the time we got to the front we had fresh sandwiches, never mind that it cost us AU$40 for 2 ham and cheese baguettes, 2 cans of coke and 2 bottles of water. We ended up eating at the back of a massive crowd and watched the semi finals of some World of Warcraft player vs player competition. On the way out we were given a blizzcon bag filled with goodies. The next day we returned and jumped straight into the queue for the expansion pack. So Owen finally got to see what he wanted at the convention!! We spent a while looking at all the exhibitions, Owen drooled over some of the gaming keyboards
and watched a few of the competitions. One thing I realised from Blizzcon is that Owen isn’t really a gaming freak, he just dabbles in gaming compared to all these other people. Children under 16 had to have parent supervision and as I found out most of the parents weren’t there for their kids they were there for themselves! It was crazy, but it was definitely an experience and seeing that it is only held in one country once a year we could not have passed up the opportunity seeing as we were in Europe at the time.
The next few days were spent sleeping in, Max generally doesn’t wake up until around 1pm, and doing our washing. On Wednesday Monique decided to take us into Paris to see a few things. Our first stop was the Sacre Coeur and Montmartre. The Sacre Coeur is very beautiful and peaceful; the church is filled with ornate stained glass windows and statues. Outside of the Sacre Coeur is Montmartre, a tourist suburb filled with artists wanting to paint or draw your portrait, it also has lots of artist selling landscapes of Paris, it is absolutely beautiful to walk through and I
would love to have a lot of money as I could have spent a fortune on all the paintings. We headed back to the car and it started to absolutely pour with rain so Monique decided to take us on a driven tour of Paris. It is amazing to think how many beautiful things there are to see, not just the monuments but the buildings and parks. I couldn’t wait to get out and see them all. But it would have to wait until we got back from Ireland.
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