We only had four days, two of which we spent watching clay-court tennis, so to be fair, our experience in Paris was a brief one.

We liked our hotel, it was a tiny, but clean, room on a quiet street and even though we got turned around almost every time we tried to navigate home, I’m glad we stayed at the Alesia Montparnasse.

The view from our room…

Getting from the Orly airport was frustrating, but I think it was compounded by the fact that we were tired after the 8+ hour flight and we arrived on a Sunday afternoon, so only one money exchange place was open (for the entire airport, so just imagine the line). It wasn’t in our terminal, of course, so we had to take a shuttle to the other terminal only to discover that all the ticket places were closed for the various forms of transportation to downtown Paris, and no one took credit cards, so we had no choice but to change money in order to leave the airport. After waiting for over 20 minutes in line, we just decided to use the ATM machine, damn the foreign fees, and be on our way.

In general, I found Paris’ streets to be terribly difficult to navigate, even with a map, and after four days I still never felt entirely confident getting anywhere. We were also stranded in Saint Germain after dinner one evening because we didn’t realize the bus line we needed stopped running after 9pm on Sundays. After that little incident, I insisted on the subway for the rest of the trip and we had no trouble on that front. We were able to buy ten tickets at a time for a discounted price and split them up among the four of us.

The food was very good, in general, but my favorite dinner was at Le Petite Zinc in Saint Germain. I had the steak tartar laced with cognac. Yum.

Breakfast was always a set price, usually 7 Euro for a croissant, cafe latte, and orange juice. Most places stopped serving breakfast by 10am and didn’t open again until lunchtime. The only real trouble we had was on the last night we wanted to just get some dessert and a bottle of wine (since we ate dinner already at the French Open), but without ordering a full fixed price menu, our options near the hotel were greatly diminished.

Here we are at our favorite breakfast place on our last morning in France… (photo taken just before drinking a pitcher of wine with our lunch!)

Overall, I thought Paris was very expensive, but that could have been due in part to where we were located and the places we chose to eat. Although, I wouldn’t think the 14th Arr. would be a particularly pricey area. The natives weren’t as rude as advertised as long as you started with a pleasant “bonjour!”, and many people just spoke English back to us anyway.

While I’m in no rush to go back, I suppose the Musee d’Orsay and the Lourve will be too big a draw to pass on forever. :)

We weren’t sure about the rules for photography at the French Open so we only brought my little camera on the first day. Once Eric witnessed the massive camera gear hauled around by various spectators (and got over his lens envy), he decided to bring our Rebel XT on the second day.

Turns out they allow just about anything in, including food and drink, hallelujah!

Maria Sharapova and Dinira Safina getting ready to start their match…

As you can see, our seats were almost directly in the center. It was a completely different view because on television, the camera are situated behind the players.

It was cloudy all morning and even though we were hoping for the best, it just wouldn’t be the French Open without a rain delay.

Thankfully, after the (relatively short) hour-long rain delay we had sunny skies for the rest of the match.

This match went down the wire, three hard-fought sets, including two tie-breaks!

See more Roland Garros photos in our Paris Flickr photo set.

On our first night in Paris we took an hour-long cruise along the Seine to various landmarks in Paris. We passed under some beautiful bridges and circled by the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame.

We sailed at 9pm, so the sun was setting just at the finish of our trip.

Hi everyone! We have been back in the USA for under 24 hours and Eric is already on another plane back to NC for an interview. He will be checking in on our house and yard and I am praying that at least one of my tomatoes has survived the 100-degree-plus heat that Durham had last week. He’ll be back tomorrow evening and then we’ll head to upstate NY for two weeks for a workshop he’ll be teaching at Hamilton College for the last two weeks of June.

I am (hopefully) on the upswing from a sinus infection (makes flying for eight hours even more fun!), so I will be resting up and posting copious amounts of photos to Flickr from our wonderful stays in both Paris and Barcelona. I will also be posting at least once a day for the next several days while I make sense of all the great experiences we had on this adventure, so stay tuned!

A quick update while I am connected to some sketchy internet on the fourth floor balcony of our Barcelona apartment.

Roland Garros was wonderful, we got to see several doubles matches but the highlights were definitely the Sharapova vs. Safina match, which Safina won 6-7, 7-6, 6-2, and the Djokovic vs. Gulbis match, which Djokovic won 7-5, 7-6, 7-5.

Court Suzanne Lenglen… we had some pretty nice seats!

Djokovic going for a net shot, this match was just awesome. I posted a ton more shots on Flickr.

Me, acting like a cheesy tourist… there’s Novak in the background!

After a lot of flying, an easy transfer in Barcelona, and some trouble negotiating Orly airport, we are finally in the heart of Paris! We are both completely exhausted due to the car, plane, and bus trips over the last few days. More later but here are a few shots of the beautifully detailed Notre Dame.

The last one was taken at the end of our Seine River cruise. :)

Today I got an email with all our French Open tickets attached! Hooray!

The first thing I did was translate the entire ticket since it’s in French and I needed to know why all the tickets have my name on them when they clearly show an illustration of someone checking IDs. Turns out I just have to change the names online and they will be registered correctly in the computer when the ticket is scanned. Check.

My next challenge was to find a good seating chart so I know where we’ll be sitting. Apparently, the organizers for Roland Garros have something against straightforward information about just where exactly your seats are. I could only find zone colors, no mention of the other qualification, OB/NB, on the tickets.

After looking all over the official website and various other ticketing aggregators, I decided to just make my own seating chart (hopefully helping out a few other folks) combined from several maps I found.

Behold!

So now I know where our tickets are!

(Here you go, Mom.)

June 2, 2008 (2 men’s singles/1 men’s doubles) - OB, Row 20, Seats 4, 6, 8, 10
June 3, 2008 (1 men’s singles/2 women’s singles) - NB, Row 5, Seats 60, 62, 64, 66

I previously wrote about how long we were going to have to wait before we found out if we actually got the French Open tickets we bought registered in advance for last November.

Well, the wait is over!

On Saturday, after Eric discovered a large charge on our credit card, we realized that the ticket purchase must have gone through. I logged into the Roland Garros site and happily found that the tickets we were issued were just what we wanted. Four tickets for the Suzanne Lenglen court, zone red (the best!), for both June 2 & 3!

This meant that we needed to scramble to buy plane tickets from Barcelona to Paris (we had to wait on this part as plane tickets are never refundable, at least the kind we buy) and find a hotel, mere weeks before our arrival. We made out fine, thankfully, so now I get to figure how much of Paris we can realistically see in the four days we’ll be there, minus the two dedicated to tennis, of course.

Expect lots of photos of us covered in red dust from Paris. :)

So far, we only have one big trip planned for this year, but (of course) that can change at a moment’s notice with us! :)

Eric has a conference in Barcelona in early June, so he came up with the idea for us to try and get tickets for the second week of the French Open, thereby starting our trip in Paris for a few days before heading south to Spain. (We still haven’t decided on train or plane for this portion of the trip, so suggestions/advice are welcome.)

We had to wait a few months before the tickets went on sale, so in November when the process opened, we registered and excitedly filled in the information for our tickets. Four tickets for Suzanne Lenglen on both June 2 and June 3. We plan for Eric’s parents to meet us in France as this is the only way my mom-in-law will get my dad-in-law to take her to Paris, finally. :)

I was surprised to see the following email in my inbox less than 10 minutes later…

“Order processing and allocation of tickets will take place from the end of March 2008. We will contact you again by mail beginning of April to inform you of the result of your request.”

Huh? I have to wait until April to know if I even have tickets?!? Grrr.

As that leaves us less than 60 days before we have to leave for our trip, we may have to approach our travel plans a bit differently. Not that I would mind a few days in Paris, but the main purpose of the trip will be to attend the French Open. The good news is that we got in early in terms of the order request, so I have to believe that we’ll at least get the days we want. The bad news is that I’ve never done this before, so who knows what will actually happen.

Sigh. I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. Stay tuned!

April 15 update: we got our tickets! :)