Our second weekend in Europe and we still had the rental car, so we decided to actually act on what we've been spouting the last few months, strolling over to France for a lunch. I'm about as cultured as two day old cheese, so what I know of France is mostly what I've seen on Fox news (which isn't nice), what my mom has told me from her trips, and what I saw in my French text books in high school. Jaime on the other hand is an expert. She has seen every romantic comedy ever released and is fully convinced that as soon as we cross the border we will have to turn on the windshield wipers to fend off the falling rose pedals. I would say that all in all it was a good experience.
Most of what you hear is true; they aren't the cleanest people; The rest area we stopped at was nasty, I mean disgusting; they poop in the woods and just leave the toilet paper and crap on the ground. With that said the cities we drove through were absolutely beautiful. I see why every oil painting looks the same, because the towns actually look like that. We were going through one small town and I pulled over on the sidewalk (because you can do that in Europe) to get out and take some photos and when I get back to the car, I see Reed standing beside the car, taking a leak on the sidewalk. My first reaction was "J, are you crazy, they are going to kill us", then I thought about it for a second and realized that this was France and they are not capable of killing us and secondly, this was France and they are used to this type of stuff, so I said "Ahhh wee wee mon petite bambino, stick it to the Frenchmen (in my best Pepe' LaPue voice).
Following the GPS, I just put in some coordinates I pulled off google, so we didn't really have a destination in mind, so we just headed downtown and drove around. Driving in a metropolitan European city is very different than DC or NYC, both of which I've driven in a few times. There are people on bicycles everywhere and people walking everywhere, so you have to pay attention, which is tough with a dog in your lap, two kids yelling "we're hungry" and a wife saying "oh look at that". Eventually, we found a spot to park and got out to walk around. Contrary to what I've heard the people were very friendly and were very willing to speak with me in my broken French. Much more friendly than the Germans have been, that's for sure.
All in all, it was a good day, nice weather and no problems to report.
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