Hey, We're in Paris!

4/15
4/24

That last batch of entries from Germany were composed on the leg from Avignon to Paris. We just changed trains (changed train stations, in fact) and now have a quick jaunt up to Lille, while we have an hour layover before our trip to Calais.
One last note before I jump to our arrival in Paris: Our new German friends are great! Thomas arranged the workshop with his company nicely and professionally and was a wonderful guide and host. The people in his company “Der Kleine Grinsverker” (The Little Grin-Train) are fun and funny, and I wish we’d had the chance to hang socially with more of them.

We caught a TGV (Train de Grande Vitesse, or Train of Great Speed) from Stuttgart to Paris. MMMM le Train de Grande Vitesse! (I’ll do an entry specifically on the trains presently).

We’ve yet to enter a city where we’ve avoided the constant amazed whisper: “Hey, we’re in [enter appropriate city here]!”
This mantra was even more frequent and even more amazed as we hit Paris. As we made our way from the train station to our host’s apartment the amazingly expected sights of citizen’s carrying baguettes, the Napoleon III style architecture, and café’s serving tiny espressos on cobblestone squares consistently evoked “Hey! We’re in Paris!” whispers and cries from your favorite traveling couple.

The night of Monday 14th wasn’t much of a tourist night, I had my first workshop with one of two groups I’m working with in Paris. The group Eux (“They” or “Them”, and the word doesn’t sound anything like “Eau” or water) was originally a student improv group which has lasted beyond the graduation of some of its members. They’ve discovered longform through books (particularly Charna & Del’s “Truth in Comedy”) and are (as far as we know) the only company attempting longform in France.

Skipping ahead (for the moment) to Tuesday the 15th, we took another of the Sandeman “free” walking tours of Paris and had a good time. Our guide wasn’t quite as confident, funny, or knowledgeable as our Berlin guide, but he was slightly new, so he couldn’t be as confident; he was American, so he couldn’t sound like Eddie Izzard, and your humble narrator happens to be interested in weird, obscure items as we walk around, so we can’t really blame him for losing the “stump the tour guide” game.

Of course the constant emergence of landmarks and monuments with which we were already familiar continued our canon of “Hey! We’re in Paris!”