Day One... or is it two?

Okay, so I haven't gone to bed since Friday night and it is now Sunday 11 p.m. here in Paris so that makes it 5 p.m. (DINNERTIME!) in my brain. Thank God I squirreled away all the lovely treats KLMservicedbyNorthwestoperatedbyDelta offered me.

Yeah, thats right. my reservation was on KLM. But guess what? KLM doesn't fly out of Boston, so it was serviced by Northwest, but guess what? Northwest doesn't have any check-in counters in Boston, you check in with their Air-slave, Delta. Are there signs to tell you this? Nowhere. Nowhere at all. So it is particularly fun with your mom two months out from a hip replacement and in a wheelchair, toting two full suitcases and two full carry-ons, to run back and forth between counters figuring out the schizophrenic airlines.

Then there was security. Oh, do they ever love the sight of a woman with a metal hip and a giant brace in a wheelchair made of metal coming their way.

No, I'm not kidding, they do. They page the woman manhandler (who was strangely reminiscent of Pat from SNL) who proceeded to pat down the maternal figure in excellent form.

Next: KLM?NW?Delta flight: was awesome. Lots of leg room, decent food, crappy movies though... (Star Trek and 17 again.... I am not a trekkie and have no desire to be 17 again.)

Amsterdam: seriously, Amster-damn, could you build an airport any fricking bigger and send me to a gate any farther from the one at which I arrived? No? I thought not.

Pluses about the Amsterdam airport: recycled Toilet Paper, recycled everything! Go you crazy Dutch people, with your... clogs and everything...

Leaving Amsterdam, in one word, sucked. There were 5 connecting passengers who never boarded but their luggage did so it took almost an hour to find their bags and heave them out of the hold for security purposes. I get that, but, man, I was already cranky. And thirsty as hell!

Flight from Amsterdam was up/down, the kind where it's pretty funny to watch the crew try to dole out and then immediately collect the beverage service and there's still that one flight attendant sprinting for his/her seat when you are 20 feet from touching down.

Got a fantastic cabbie from the airport to the apartment. On the way I remembered how to speak French again. No, seriously, the guy was a sweetheart and helped out my mom a bunch with the wheelchair and all.

THE APARTMENT I RENTED IS AWESOME. I'll try to post pics tomorrow. Retaining a lot of the traditional French stuff in a very historic neighborhood, but totally modern and cool. Love it.

Crashed hard when we got here. Slept and woke up good to go. I went to secure some necessary provisions (wine) , then headed out with the Weagle on wheels for dinner. That was a trip. If you saw my facebook pic, that waiter hated us! It was so perfectly Parisian. I think I earned his respect in the middle of our meal though, when a very highly intoxicated and likely homeless Frenchman decided to talk to us. It turned out he thought we were British and wanted to argue the fact that the French were far superior to the Brits due to the fact that the French kings had far more mistresses (he went on and on about Louis the IV and 63 mistresses.... if there is any historical accuracy to that, I have no idea...) I wielded the rusty French pretty well, though and drove him away as mom looked on quizzically and the actual Brits at the next table cowered.

In the end the waiter didn't hate us as much as the Brits.

After dinner I took the mom down to the Jardins du Luxembourg, a very awesome "green space." She loved it and the weather was perfect, but I gotta tell you, pushing a wheelchair on cobblestone and uneven pavement all day does a number on you. I'm sore.

But I'm in Paris. Sitting in my apartment in the heart of the city typing a blog. What writer doesn't dream about that?

I'm lucky.