Sunday, January 29, 2012

A Short Side Trip

From London, Paris is a 2.5 hour train ride. Reason enough to hop on over there next Thursday, returning Monday. I've never been under the English channel before. Sounds fun.

I've made reservations for the Cézanne exhibit at the Musee du Luxombourg, and a dinner/show combination at the Crazy Horse cabaret. From what I understand, Crazy Horse is a wholesome place with lots of good entertainers. Naked maybe, but good. 

Our Paris apartment is in Montmarte, the area where lots of famous artists lived and partied and painted. There's a plaza in this part of town, Place du Tertre, that's so overrun with artists you have to beat them off you to keep from buying an unwanted portrait of yourself. Really fun stuff. Naked entertainers and rabid packs of artists. What a great city.

When booking reservations for the Cézanne exhibit, the Musee du Luxombourg web site was in French. I could have had Google translate it for me, but decided this was a good time to test the translation app on my iPhone, Word Lens. I held the phone up to the laptop and the app, although not perfect, translated well enough that I was able to navigate through several pages of ticket ordering chaos.

Word Lens at work.

Tomorrow morning we take a 8:00 train to St. Pancras/Kings Cross stations (Harry Potter's magic train left from platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross). Robin says there's a luggage trolley embedded half in the wall there. So Harry Potter. Now it has been moved to the front of the station, so maybe we'll grab a shot of some young wizards going off to school.