Trip to Paris

My new manager is based in Paris, so I went to see him this week - out Wednesday morning, back Thursday night - very civilized! I stayed in a strange but nice little "boutique" hotel near the office which was very close to the Eiffel Tower. In fact on my one night there, I took a stroll to to see it after dinner. It was a relatively warm evening after a really beautiful day, and there were loads of people just sitting around on the grass and on benches near the tower in small groups, hanging out and enjoying life. I enjoyed being able to just wander on my own, though it would have been wonderful to be there with loved ones in a little huddle on the grass as well.


In the actual office where I've been working these two days, there is an historic part of the building which has an old photo of the Schlumberger brothers making some downhole measurements, and next to the photo are the actual holes in the ground which are shown in the photo! Pretty cool.

So tonight I took the Eurostar train back from Paris to London, except that there were a lot of delays along the way which meant that I wouldn't get back home until after 11pm. I made the extremely spontaneous decision to grab my stuff and run off the train when we arrived into Ashford! It hadn't even occurred to me to do this until the train was slowing to a stop already at the platform. I figured I could take a taxi from here straight home and still shave an hour off my travel time. It was exhilarating to do this! And the taxi driver that I found who would take me turned out to be this interesting self-proclaimed "odd jobs man" called DAZ. When I said where I wanted to do and asked if it was too far for him, he didn't flinch and said that he regularly took people as far as they wanted to do - including northern England and even Spain! He drove a mini-bus that he had kitted out to be more of a disco party bus with a big sound system and disco lights in the back. Awesome! This was a nice way to end the trip, and what makes it even better is that tomorrow is the last day of school before Easter holidays and the last day of the month as well. Bring it on.