Le Voyage d'Affaires - Paris

Ok, so Mary wanted me to blog about my trip to other side of the "pond". Why do wives "always" volunteer their husbands to do things they don't want to do? Is it a control thing or something? :)

Anyway, in case you don't know my job required me to travel over to Florence, Italy for a few days to train a group of users of our application suite called Gensuite. Basically, I help support a suite of web based applications that allow GE and it's businesses measure, track, and improve upon their environmental, health, safety (EHS), quality, regulatory, etc metrics. Yes, I work with computers all day - it's rough but someone has to suffer.

I travelled with one of my colleagues and we had a 9 hour layover in Paris. 9 hours?!?! Why you ask. We planned it that way so we could see some of the sites...like this:

We took the hour train ride from Charles De Gaulle down into Paris to get on the Eiffel Tower - great story here -- how many of you can say that they climbed all the stairs to the first stage of the Eiffel Tower? Well, my colleague and I did it - completely by accident. My colleague took us to the line that starts to climb it instead of the line for elevator. I know very intelligent, he's not very patient. Regardless we made it to first stage and took a nice break and enjoyed the view of Paris along with a Coke and a French slice of pizza. Wasn't too bad. We then proceeded to find the elevator to the second and finally the third stages. The view was spectacular!

Now keep in mind my trip started at 7:30PM EDT Saturday night and we are seeing Paris at Noon CET -- 6 hours ahead of the cities of New York, Boston, and Atlanta. I had about 2-3 hours of sleep on the plane and we made it through Paris and eventually landed in Florence (Firenze for the locals) at 9PM CET. That is one way to beat jet lag and the time difference - exhuast yourself on the day of travel and sleep like a rock at night.

This is the view from the third stage (top deck) of the tower

I think I can definitely visit Paris again - we only had time for the Eiffel tower since we needed to be back to the airport in time for our next flight. We had hoped to visit the Louvre and Arc de Triomphe - but because of an impatient colleague jumping on the wrong train and not knowing where to go in the airport we blew about 2 extra hours we could have used. No - I'm not mad, but he now knows to listen to the guy with the map -- me! I am the type when going on business trips, I'll find out where the sites are and map them out and understand the public transits so I can get to where I'm going as quickly as possible.

So I'll leave you with a little trivia -- What famous person's office was at the top of the Eiffel Tower? I have more about Italy that I'll blog about a little later. Ciao!