How not to ride a Velib'

Since arriving in Paris I've been wanting to try the Velib', the new bike-rental system that the mayor has put into place in the city and that has supposedly transformed Parisians into much more bike-friendly individuals. The idea is simple: you go up to an electronic post where you insert your credit card and choose an abonnement - one day, seven days or one year. All rides under 30 minutes are free and those that go over have a very nominal fee.

Like I said, it's really simple, at least in theory. Of course, I like to make things more complicated for myself, and so decided one drunken Saturday evening to rent one. I couldn't have chosen to do my first essai (the first time I've ridden a bike in years, mind you) near a park on a Sunday morning. No, it had to be a busy Saturday in the Marais in the time between drinks and dinner. As I had spent the entire afternoon and early evening participating in a pub crawl, I definitely wasn't in the best shape to be mounting a rather heavy bicycle in one of the cities busiest quartiers filled with some Paris' narrowest streets.

During my five minute Velib' adventure, I did learn some valuable lessons:
1) Even if you think you can walk straight while slightly buzzed, you definitely cannot pedal straight.
2) Parisian roads arc in a much more noticeable degree than those in the states and gutters are unavoidable, especially if you've just learned lesson #1.
3) In order to shift speeds so that the pedals aren't spinning like the wheels of a Mazeratti, you have to pedal in a straight line for at least 30 feet or more, again rather hard to do once you've learned lessons #1 and #2.
4) Having a sober friend and consumate cycliste behind you shouting at you to "pedal, pedal" and ignore the cars, doesn't make the looming yellow headlights coming up fast behind you any less menacing.
4) Surprisingly, Parisian drivers don't want to deal with drunken cyclists screaming and skidding diagonally across the road in front of them into a gutter while they are trying to get to dinner on a Saturday night. (How could I argue with the driver who went past me and growled, "if you don't know how to ride a bike, you should walk"?)
5) It is best, if you have just learned the above lessons, to return the Velib' to the nearest station.

Though this was one of the most terrifying events in my Parisian life, I will still attempt the Velib' again, but doucement, bien sûr. Sunday in the 16th might be the best idea, after lots of coffee.

Cheap airfare anxiety

Finding a cheap one-way ticket to Paris is always a crap shoot. So much depends on the time of year you're flying and how far in advance you book. Add to this the general stress of an overseas move, the tense wait for a work visa and an increasingly irrational terror of flying and you have a pretty good idea of how I was feeling when I went online to book my flight. I googled everything I could think of to bring up a legitimate and cheap booking service - "cheap airline tickets" "low price airline tickets" "dirt cheap flights" and I did find some promising looking sights that unfortunately advertised a fare that was no longer available (cheeky bastard monkeys!). In the end I decided to go with my old stand-by, Expedia. I've used them with the majority of my international and domestic flights and I've never had a problem getting a reasonable deal with well-known carriers. Plus I already have an account with them so I didn't have to go through the process of creating a user name, password etc. (Did I also mention that when it comes to booking flights I am incredibly lazy?) This time, however, I was confronted with a real dilemma - choosing between two airlines that I had never heard of before. My first choice was Aer Lingus, an Irish airline that stopped in Dublin on the way, and the other was Condor, a German charter airline that would take me to Frankfurt and then on to Paris. I started feeling panicked, who did I trust to fly me over the Atlantic, the Irish or the Germans. My friends were all in agreement, especially the Irish ones, fly with the Germans. My mom's advice was to pray about it and God would tell me what flight to take. I told her that I thought he would want me to take the cheaper one. And so that's what I did. Booked a flight on an airline that I had never heard of. For the next five weeks I woke up in a panic, imagining that my flight was going down. It didn't help matters that I had just watched The Secret and learned that I had the power to make manifest that which I imagined. Oy! I really have to stop imagining such negative things.

All told, I woke up the morning of my flight reassured that God would not be so cruel as to give me this job in Paris and then have me go down in a fireball somewhere off the coast of Greenland. And I made it. Not even a bit of turbulence. I even slept through the in flight movies thanks to a couple of Bloody Mary's and two Advil PM.