This was an odd day. We got up to find that our planned train to Paris scheduled for just before 10am tomorrow had been canceled due to all the demonstrations in France. This was a frustrating turn of events, considering how much we have all been looking forward to the upcoming week. It’s a holiday week for the schools so we bought train tickets and reserved an apartment to spend a week in Paris, our first real opportunity to see Paris since arriving in France. By mid-afternoon, Melinda and I were lucky to get our tickets switched to a later train, thanks to a helpful person at one of train station offices who happened to speak English. In other words, the trip is on and by tomorrow night we should be in Paris.

On our way home from this successful outing, we had to walk a little extra distance because our tram line wasn’t running from the center of town. The reason had nothing to do with strikes or demonstrations, but was because the city was providing tram and bus safety awareness lessons along the tracks. Videos were being shown and people could even operate a bus or the tram (I tried to get Melinda to stand in line to operate the tram – what a blog posting THAT would have been – but it was just taking too long). Anyway, I took this video (something completely different) while we gawked at the tram safety video.

It was of even greater interest to us because it focused on Ella’s school tram stop. Apparently, because of all the students there, it’s one of the most dangerous stops in the city.

Relieved at having gotten the train to Paris situation squared away, we met Frédérique and Laurent at Manon’s volleyball game (they won and Manon was outstanding!). And then we went back to the Boudeaus for dinner, not getting back home until very late, hence this late posting.