Richard Huff's Seattle Social Blog - Travel

Paris, France - My New Favorite City.

nospam@example.com (Richard D. Huff) — Sun, 1 Apr 2007 23:23:30 -0700

I've stated, in the past, that London was my favorite city of all the cities I've ever visited. That was before I'd had the pleasure to acquaint myself with Paris. Knowing that Paris is one of the world's foremost cities, I'm prepared to go as far as to say that I'd be surprised if any city ever topped Paris on my new list of favorite cities. It's the wide sidewalks, the metro, the public art, the museums, the people, the food, and the wine. Most importantly, I felt that the Parisians have a much more profound understanding of what it means to live a good life.

Take the three photos of shops from the Ile St. Louis pictured below. These aren't showcases at Disney World's EPCOT or shops within a large grocery mega-store pretending an old-world charm. These are working shops that serve the actual community. They don't require that you jump in a car and drive fifteen miles, which is what many Americans do without a second thought. They're not only the past, they're the future, and they're better.


Cheese & Wine Shop	Meat Shop	Duck & Pheasant

Let's hope that the Administration change this country will experience in 2008 affords us a opportunity to honestly evaluate our lifestyle.

Running In Paris.

nospam@example.com (Richard D. Huff) — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 12:27:09 -0700

If you're a runner visiting Paris, consider running classic parts of the city. Paris is very "runner friendly". You'll likely see people on the wide sidewalks jaunting past you when you walk the city. Melissa and I took the opportunity and ran from our hotel, down the Champs-Elysees to the Louvre and (the other direction) to the Eiffel Tower. Route maps were captured with my Garmin Forerunner 305:


Champs-Elysees to Louvre	Champs-Elysees to Eiffel

It was a very memorable experience that I'm happy to have had. We might even start to make a tradition of visiting and running in world-renowned cities.

The Louvre, Paris.

nospam@example.com (Richard D. Huff) — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 11:26:02 -0700

I'm really behind on posting information and photos about the trip Melissa and I took to Paris in November of 2006. That doesn't mean that I've abandoned the task.

To catch you up, the last post was all about our first full day in Paris (a Sunday). Since Monday was a workday, both of us took the day off from being tourists. Melissa had to meet her team at an ungodly hour Monday morning, and I slept in. The rest of my daytime was spent working remotely in the hotel room via the Internet. (Praise the gods of TCP/IP!). We got together in the evening for the first of many incredible dinners before collapsing from the jet lag exhaustion.

Tuesday was another workday for Melissa, but I had planned to spend the whole day at the Louvre rather than slave over a laptop. Little did I know that the Louvre closes every Tuesday. (Do they dust?) My plans veered, and I showed up to the glass pyramid early Wednesday morning for a full-day art marathon.

To complete the Louvre in a day, you need to visit the museum by yourself. You also need to study the guide map before deciding on a strategy. There are some collections that you'll observe rapidly. Other collections may require much more attention because of your personal level of interest (e.g., paintings or sculpture). Special objects in various collections, like the Mona Lisa, require extra time because of the limited number visitors allowed to approach the piece at any given moment. Whatever the strategy, you must pace yourself.

My Louvre photo collection contains a mere eighteen images. This is a direct result of my interest in seeing the whole Louvre rather than capturing parts of the Louvre on film. I can't emphasis enough that you should see the Louvre in person.

Ile St-Louis and Cathedrale Notre Dame de Paris

nospam@example.com (Richard D. Huff) — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 10:48:00 -0700

Time around the holidays flies faster than a jet plane. Melissa and I got back from Paris on the 5th of December, but I'm only now getting a chance to catch up on my blog.

Our second day in Paris (a Sunday) was spent casually walking around the city. There was so much to take in that I didn't even try to keep track of where we were on a map. Those tourist types that you find fingering a map at the corner of an intersection never really impressed me anyway. Melissa's knowledge of the city from when she lived in Paris kept us from getting lost.

Place des Vosges, Place de la Bastille, Ile St-Louis, Notre Dame de Paris, and La Tour Eiffel were all on our Sunday walk. Take a look at the photo collection.

Paris.

nospam@example.com (Richard D. Huff) — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 10:23:00 -0700

Following a wonderful Thanksgiving with my girlfriend's family in Portland, we hopped on an early flight to Paris. (I never get over how long the flight is from the West Coast of the USA to Western Europe. It beats crossing the Atlantic by boat, but twelve to fourteen hours in a plane isn't my idea of fun.) We arrived in Paris at 6:45 AM, very tired. Our hotel allowed early check-in, which gave us a chance to clean up and rest before seeing any of the city. We're lucky to be staying right on The Champs - Elysees, not far from the Arc de Triomphe.

Melissa (my girlfriend) is going to be working during the week, but our stay will give us two full weekends of sightseeing together, in addition to every evening. I'll strike out on my own during the weekdays to see sights that she has already seen, since she lived in Paris for a time several years ago.

As has been my experience with other International travel, the guides and shows tend to exaggerate or outright lie about certain aspects of the culture. For example, people in France are not rude. In fact, they are extremely accommodating when your French is less than perfect. The city of Paris is also unbelievably clean and quiet. Compared to other major cities I've visited throughout the world, Paris is easily one of the nicest.

I've made a collection of photos from our Paris, Day One available.

I'll be missing the Seattle Half Marathon because of this unexpected trip, so I'm going to see if I can't get some good running in while I'm in Paris (to ease a little bit of the runner's guilt). It'll be fun to see how my Garmin Forerunner 305 works for capturing Paris routes.

London, England - My Favorite City.

nospam@example.com (Richard D. Huff) — Sat, 8 Apr 2006 16:53:00 -0700

Of all the cities I've had an opportunity to visit, London is easily my favorite. This status might have something to do with the fact that I usually end up in London following a less than spectacular experience in another European region. Despite the potential for a comparative bias, there are still plenty of unbiased attributes that keep London at the top of my list. For one, I've always felt completely safe while in London. That's quite an accomplishment for a city with a population of 7.5 million (2005 estimate). Not once have I been approached by strangers asking for monetary handouts, which I can't seem to avoid while walking a few blocks in downtown Seattle. I'm sure there is crime in London, but the city feels so much more civilized than Seattle (where you might, regularly, have to step over the beggars and homeless on the sidewalks).

On my way back from Italy, I stopped in London for a few days to see Gavin while he was visiting high-profile Microsoft customers. It's not every day that both Gavin and I find ourselves in Europe at the same exact time. We took the chance to spend one of the days touring the city with Eric (another Microsoftie).

Take a look at my photos from London.

Pisa, Italy - A Pleasant City.

nospam@example.com (Richard D. Huff) — Wed, 5 Apr 2006 09:50:34 -0700

My day in Pisa was the most pleasant of my whole trip. (It was the first chance I had to explore Italy at my own pace.) The Italians are, as claimed in most travel books, very friendly towards Americans. The friendliness is sincere -- not that sort of tourism friendliness you might find in some other tourist destinations. The woman at the airport information desk, the bus drivers, and the young luggage storage woman planning a trip of her own to study in New York, were just plain nice.

Pisa is an ancient city by almost any account. The archaeological record indicates that Etruscans (precursors to the Romans) settled in the same area during the 5th century BCE.

My exploration started at the Piazza dei Miracoli (where the leaning tower sits). From there, I walked to the Piazza dei Cavalieri, then on to the Corsa Italia (shopping district street), the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, and finished at the Piazza della Stazione (where I caught the bus back to the aeroporto). This route took me across most of the city. The Wikipedia has an excellent entry covering Pisa, so I won't try to duplicate that same information here.

Take a look at my photos from Pisa.

Travel Checklist: Internet Access.

nospam@example.com (Richard D. Huff) — Sun, 2 Apr 2006 08:30:03 -0700

Ubiquitous access to broadband Internet service ( > 1mbps) â€“ which is critical to the realization of the Internetâ€™s true potential â€“ still eludes us. Itâ€™s not that several attempts have failed. We just havenâ€™t really tried. Cellular phone service, however, is getting pretty close to ubiquity, which is why I looked for a mobile data solution to my Internet access needs abroad. Knowing that I wouldnâ€™t have immediate access to local, broadband services (i.e., xDSL or WiFi) in Pieve a Nievole, my goal was to have a service that I could at least rely on in an "emergency". It just so happens that Cingular provides a broadband wireless service in the USA that is compatible with services offered in Europe (albeit, via roaming).

The first thing to know about the service is that you canâ€™t believe Cingular when they tell you that it isnâ€™t compatible with the Macintosh. If, as a Macintosh user, you havenâ€™t already come to realize you canâ€™t trust most vendors when they tell you that something isnâ€™t compatible, let this be your lesson. Whether you use the built-in Bluetooth to connect through your phone, or you use one of several PC cards, the service works just fine with a Macintosh. The trick is that youâ€™ll need a piece of software that replaces the drivers typically shipped for Windows. A German company (Novamedia) makes a MacOS X software package they call Mobile High Speed (MHS), which supports a very large variety of different phones and PC cards. Special Note: at the time of this writing, the software does not (yet) support the new Intel Macintosh models. Also, the new MacBook Pro does not have a PC card slot â€“ it has a newer Express card slot. Youâ€™d have to use the Bluetooth method of connecting through your cell phone, rather than use a separate PC card.

Once you have the service from Cingular and the software from Novamedia, you can get Internet access at speeds greater than 1mbps pretty much anywhere. The service is sold for a flat-fee of US$60 per month in Seattle. The roaming charges can be quite steep, and appear to be based primarily on the data transfer. I'm bracing myself for the bill.

Update: March 15, 2007 - Novamedia has changed the name of their MacOS X mobile data software from Mobile High Speed to Launch2Net. The previous link in this post has been updated. In other news, the data charges for my time in Italy totaled $1,937. Most of the amount was due to sending a single e-mail that contained 25 megabytes in attachments. The service is excellent if you just need to perform some e-mail or web browsing. Don't make the mistake I made and use it for large e-mail attachments or file transfers.