Hello from our new flat with our OWN COMPUTER!!! Ah, at last. Trouble is, there isn't any furniture in the lounge so I'm sitting cross-legged with the keyboard in my lap.
The last couple of days have been quite frenetic what with moving in and all, and getting our freight delivered at last. All arrived safe and sound in perfect nick, even better than I was expecting. The only trouble is that yes, Britain indeed does have a slightly different broadcast standard - PAL/I instead of PAL./B, as a website I found described - which means I can get picture but no sound. All is not lost though... we just need another box to 'translate' the signal into audio and video output - which means we'll either have to pick up another VCR, or (sigh) subscribe to cable, what a shame. (OR we could try and just buy a cheap TV, but that'd be cheating!)
We went to Paris for the last Thursday/Friday/Saturday/Sunday ... had a ball. Paris is a really beautiful city. Amazing it's only 3 hours' train ride away! We did all the obligatory touristy things - Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre (well the outside anyway... figured we didn't have enough time to go in), Musee Rodin etc. And we also wandered around a lot and spent a lot of time eating really yummy food!!! No wonder the Brits have such a bad culinary reputation having to compete with food like that. We did the Catacombs tour - in the early 19th century, the cemeteries were all overflowing, so they dug up all the old bones and placed them in crypts. You go down into these cellars and there are thousands of bones in 3.5 km of tunnels. Creepy! They were all arranged like a mosaic pattern, with lines of skulls, then femur ends, then arm bone ends, then skulls again... We stayed in Montmatre, in a place Jennie recommended. It was good - very run down but clean and comfortable, and cheap. My French also got me by with surprising ease - and things got easier day by day, once I'd figured out the key phrases I needed 90 percent of the time.
While we were there we also went to see Alien 4, which has been released in France but not yet the UK (is it in NZ yet?) - in English with French subtitles. It's very good - not as good as the first two though, but still worth seeing, and better than the third. Ripley's back and she's REALLY mean this time!
Well that's about all for now - we get to watch the All Blacks thrash England this weekend (on Sky at a pub somewhere), then get to see them IN PERSON at WEMBLEY the weekend after. Got my All Black jersey out...
