| From: "Bron Gondwana" <brong@brong.net> Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2002 04:33:30 +1000 (EST) |
This is just a quick fill in because French keyboards are unusable by anyone used to standard qwerty keyboards (this is a azerty keyboard!) We went from Gryon to Geneva for a couple of days - big fountain! After Geneva was Lyon in France... stayed in a hotel which charged extra for using a shower, and wasn't particularly wonderful, so we headed straight to Paris after checking out the Textile Museum and a great view from the top of the hill. Been in Paris for a couple of days now - moved hostels because the first one had no kitchen and was very expensive (and had rats! There's a hole in one of our food bags to prove it!) Saw Notre Dame, Napoleon's tomb and a really badly tuned choir singing various songs - including some we do in MUCS. The conductor took all the songs we know way too fast, quite ruined them with his 'creative' use of tempo - they just kept speeding up! We're both really homesick for our choirs now - good singing (ish) here we come. Plan to do the rest of the diaries for these days from the UK where we have the laptop to type them, and keyboards that make sense... We'll be there on Tuesday now - going to use up a bit more of our Britrail passes. Only 10 days left until we get on the plane... |
| From: "Bron Gondwana" <brong@brong.net> Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 00:13:19 +1100 (EST) |
Up early for showers and breakfast - there aren't many showers in the hostel, so getting in early is good! Breakfast was really good - heaps of very fresh French bread and jam, and lots of hot chocolate. The only problem is that the hot chocolate sends you straight back to sleep! We succumbed and slept until 11am. We walked around Notre Dame, then I joined the queue for the towers while Kate sat around in the gardens and read. The queue took over 3/4 hour - then the tower was very cool. Lots of Victor Hugo (author of 'Notre Dame de Paris' - known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame to us Englishers) memorial stuff, and heaps of gargoyles. I had very stupidly not taken any spare film with me, and ran out up there. Doh! In the queue I was hassled by beggars a couple of times - Kate had it worse, she was approached no less than 6 times, 3 of them by the same woman. We found that 'do you speak English', when asked on the streets of Paris, means that the person is about to beg. Some of the beggars are quite persistant, running along beside you and jumping in front to state their case one more time. Walked via Pont Neuf (literally 'New Bridge' - the oldest bridge in Paris) to the Hotel des Invalides, which contains an Army Museum and Napoleon's Tomb. We walked over to get a view of the Eiffel Tower, then ran off to make the concert we'd discovered the day before. It probably wasn't worth bothering in retrospect, the sopranos were painfully flat, the conductor was playing with the timing so much that they weren't together, and it was made much worse by it being pieces that we knew (some of them pub songs from AICSA choirs). They were all done far too fast, which didn't help cover up the flaws in the performance. The English pronunciation was quite good, but they couldn't say the unfamiliar words fast enough to keep up with the conductor (who not only started too fast, but sped up during the pieces!). Had 2-minute noodles for dinner (on the theory that we couldn't cook anything more complex in that hostel). |
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