Experiencing my first thunder (lightning?) storm in France -- not impressed -- Colorado's are much, much better! This is pretty wimpy -- the thunder sounds more like someone rolling an empty dumpster down a coblestone street -- and lightning -- what lightining? -- maybe it is a dumpster! The rain is pretty solid though.
Today turned into a problem-solving day trying to straighten-out issues that cropped-up yesterday. First on the agenda was getting access to my frozen Yahoo email accounts. This also happened when I first arrived -- looks like I have something to "look forward to" every month. When I go to log ito my account, I receive a message informing me that my account has been suspended due to "suspicious activity" (my using it in France) -- and I need to retrieve a code from a secondary source -- one of my other accounts, which would not be a big deal except that the secondary soure is another email account which has also been "suspended for suspicious activity" -- think of it like a daisy chain or a closed circle. Fortunately I have an inactive account which no longer receives much, if any email, that I couild get into and start undoing the daisy-chain suspensions -- one account was actually "locked" and that was a bit trickier getting opened. Oh well, all is fine for now.
Then, on to the next challenge. Next week I'm taking a train trip to Belgium for a few days and I had the option of booking/purchasing tickets online or going to a train station and doing it in person. Having gone to the train station and interacting with an agent a couple of weeks ago, I knew that most of the agents do not speak Emglish and that the few who do are only sightly more proficient at English than I am at French -- thus I opted to go online where the website is available in English. In retrospect, that may not have been the best option.
Booked the trip/purchased the tickets with minimal problems -- the next step was for them to send me an email confirmation and in that confirmation would be a code and instructions as to how to obtain the paper tickets I needed to actually board the train (could not find a cellphone option). The email said to go to the station, input the code at a machine and print out the tickets -- sounds like a "no-brainer" -- minor problem, when I got to the station, there were no ticket machines with the option to print new tickets.
So, I ended-up with the station agent for help anyway -- let's just say with my lack of French skills and her lack of English skills, we both smiled at each other a lot with puzzled looks on our faces --and finally resorted to writing each other notes on a piece of paper -- apparently our reading skills were better than our listening or speaking skills -- and managed to print out tickets for what appeared to be the first half of the trip (there were two train changes involved) but neither of us could figure out why she couldn't get the tickets for the remaining segments to print.
Ended up leaving with tickets for only half of the trip. Called the online company only to find out they were only available four days a week (in India), were closed now, and wouldn't be reopening until Monday morning. Kind of a pickle to be in over the weekend!
Went on the computer and (at 4:30) found a local sales office (open here until 5:30). At 5:20 I finally found the office (let's just say that the US is not the only place where street names for the same piece of asphalt change three times in the space of a half mile.) She quickly figured out what the isssue was -- at the bottom of the ticket in small print it read "Semi-flex any Belgium station" -- which I'm sure everyone reading this knew meant that the ticket was good for travel "anywhere" in Belgium -- of course, how could I have been such an idiot! (Better question, why didn't the original train station agent who printed the tickets -- know the ticket was good for the entire journey?)
Don't know as today was all that interesting but, here in Paris, just like back in Colorado Springs, "stuff' happens and your only choice is to just deal with it. Upside for today -- I got to meet a couple of friendly people, had the opportunity to see a section of Paris I otherwise wouldn't have seen, found a pop-up flea market happenng tomorrow morning and got in a few miles of walking that I hadn't planned on -- all-in-all, a decent day! Oh, and the thunder and lightning storm too!
