Disneyland Paris and Nice..

Posted by Ronan on Jul 25, 2006 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

Wow.. busy last couple of days.. We headed to Disneyland Paris last week, and I have to be honest I wasn’t overly impressed with the place. There was about 4 good roller-coasters: space mountain, Indiana Jones, thunder mountain and the best of all was Rock ‘n’ Roll in the Studios part of the resort. It goes from 0 to 57 miles-per-hour in 2.8 seconds followed by loops, twists turns etc.. However none were as good as Dragon Khan in Valencia! This is the bench mark.

Saturday morning we headed to Orly airport for our 7am flight, which meant getting up at 4.30 – not easy! Slept for a bit on the plane and after a little delay we landed in Nice at 9 ish. Got breakfast there and headed to meet up with Shellys friends Cathrine & Yvonne who were touring Italy and France. We stayed with their friends – Louise and Damien – who I must say were good to let us stay in their lovely a/c apartment.

Nice is a great spot – small – but it has all the cote d’azur feel. Strange thing about the place is the beach – or the lack of sand! the whole place is covered in cobbles – not easy to walk on or get in/out of the water. Saturday night was a late night as we went for dinner at 8.30 and had a couple of drinks in the centre of Nice.

On Sunday we headed to Monaco .. a great place to see and visit – not to live in. Ferrari’s, Porsche, Zonda’s etc are seen everywhere. What was strange was that people would gather and take photos of ‘random’ stars getting into their fancy cars and driving away.

Monday saw us fly back to Paris for out last week here.

its jazz man

Posted by Ronan on Jul 21, 2006 in Uncategorized | 3 comments

We went to a jazz club wednesday night, Zwi recommended it and came along also. It was packed. The band or ‘big band’ as they called themselves was led by Carla Bley, a 70+ year old woman, who, while taking the stage, looked likely to fall over at any moment! In saying that, when she sat down and played piano, she was transformed back into her younger self. At the start and end of each song she orchestrated the band and kept everyone on their toes. At the start of the night she also introduced band members and told a little story, her voice is a typical sultry jazz voice which was reflected in the music throughout the night. Songs like ‘greasy gravy’, ‘awful coffee’ and ‘goodbye mr pork pie hat’ really had the jazz. My favourite of the night was ‘tiauna traffic’ it was amazing. I’ve never seen so many musicians (18 in all) packed on such a tiny stage. For reference and perhaps future visits, the name of the club is ‘new morning’ and located on Rue des Petites Escuries(7-9).

catch up..

Posted by Ronan on Jul 15, 2006 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

bastille day – was great..
The planes doing a flyby of the champs elysees were deafening!
its was cool to see the army marching, tanks, planes etc. but when one thinks about what they are used for, then one doesn’t think they are so cool anymore. Later that day we met up with Zwi and daughter Diana to watched the fireworks show over the Eiffel Tower.

We did a day trip to Versaille; what an amazing house and gardens. The amount of wealth in the house is unbelievable, the place has been kept to reflect the period and thus not much has changed since the French revolution when a certain Marie Antoinette said “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”. La brioche doesn’t exactly look like cake..

We also saw Superman Returns this weekend. I look forward to the MGBs review. There isn’t much dialog and the movie plays for 2h34m but I have to say.. I quite liked it.

random stuff

Posted by Ronan on Jul 11, 2006 in Uncategorized | 3 comments

woohoo! It’s sunny here.. almost too warm! I thought I saw with the corner of my eye a guy in a brown monks costume running from shade to shade. If I spot him again, I’ll start to worry.

I brought my little alarm clock/temperature thing and it reads 30 in the night and goes down to 26 in the morning where it starts to rise again. The first couple of days were tough and very hard to sleep. But I’m getting used to it now.

Traveling to work isn’t too bad now as the metro is getting quiter, which is good because it is roasting all the time.

This week is should be fun, Bastille day which includes: fantastic fireworks show on the Eiffel Tower, full military procession etc etc. We’ll grab some photos and upload them later.

So France lost and Italy won.. I think France were the better team and probably should have won. Most of the papers seem to point at Materazzi provocating zindane for the sending off, but Zidane shouldn’t have reacted the way he did.

So who has won the money? Has the Wexford lad paid up?

another restless night..

Posted by Ronan on Jul 5, 2006 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

france have beaten portugal!! Zizou again with the goal ( albeit a dodgy peno)!

so the french are out in numbers tooting horns and singing Allez les blues!

I have invented a new Metro Game, all you need a walkman/cd player/mp3 player, a good set of headphones and line of sight of two people talking. The game is to Guess what they are talking about, if you can’t lip read an alternative is dub their conversation with something from a movie.. for example

Man#1
Excuse me, can you tell me how to
get to the medical school? I’m
supposed to be giving a lecture in
twenty minutes and my driver’s a bit
lost.

YOUNG WOMAN
(heavy European accent)
Go straight aheads and makes a left
over za bridge.

Lloyd checks out her body.

Man#1
I couldn’t help noticing the accent.
You from Jersey?

YOUNG WOMAN
(unimpressed)
Austria.

Man#1
Austria? You’re kidding.
(mock-Australian accent)
Well, g’day, mate. What do you say
we get together later and throw a
few shrimp on the barbie.

Can you guess the movie ? answers on a postcard to Paris, FranceLand.

bonjour !

Posted by Ronan on Jul 4, 2006 in Uncategorized | 5 comments

well I have arrived safe and sound in Paris. It has been terrific since arriving, although there was a couple of things to bring me down, namely Galway losing in the hurling and Argentina getting knocked out.. Damn Germans!
France are into the semifinals, and going by the celebrations on Saturday night, if they win the world cup the Champs Elysees will be amazing! The crowd really started to build around 12am and moved up and down only pausing for 10-15 minutes to worship the giant zizou on a billboard.

We spent some time wandering around and have visited the Arc de Triomph and watched the crazy drivers for a while and then watched the sun set, it was cool. Walked over to Notre Damn and the Eiffel tour, plenty more to see and do in Paris!
The apartment is very nice, very clean, very new. There is a 32inch flat screen TV and the place has broadband which is handy for blogging and catching up with whats going on.

Work is going good too, but the FT labs are really hot, much hotter than our Lab in the Foundation building, which is hard to believe!