Red wine my ass

Paris: What keeps people trim? Red wine they say. I think they need to consider smoking and stairs. It was rather a shock to see soooo many people smoking, everywhere. While they walked, while they ate lunch, while they breastfed their babies in the park, while they stood in line, while they were making out (people do show a lot of affection here). It was a bit discouraging. Then came the thing no one tells you about. The stairs. They are everywhere as well. To get down into the subway to come up out of the subway, to use every bathroom that is in Paris is down a circular flight of stairs. Paris is not a very wheelchair friendly place. Actually Paris is not a very friendly place period. They children were all very nice and would engage, not so much the adults. On our first day in Paris we took the subway into town (very easy to use and figure out as long as you knew where you were going) we stopped a little outside cafe (very Parisian) and had a beer (ok two) and I had to use the restroom, which were down a flight of stairs and in a very small closet. As I was in the stall the light in my stall went out, the stall was completely sealed. Total black. I have to feel where the paper is the lock (that took a minute) and the flusher (ok, I gave up on that until I could open the door and could peak) I went to wipe and leaned forward banging my head on the door which caused me to giggle and then when I stood my elbows hit everything else the room I started to laugh, then as I struggled with the locking mechanism and door handle I was almost in hysterics with laughter. I am sure I left an impression on everyone else in the room. The sites were fun and we met many wonderful tourists waiting in line with us. Our host was wonderful and when our time was up we were ready to move on. The best site was the enormous train station that we left out of. Just gorgeous. Watching the board that keeps track of all the trains is a masterpiece. It is not electronic, but rather copper plates that rotate individually to find the right letter or number or space to spell out the train name and which gate it leaves from. We also came across a very nice young man that helped us in the Europass line find a free way to use our pass to get to Amsterdam. He worked so hard to get us to understand what he was trying to tell us (he is working on his English) Dave and I had to change trains 5 times to get to Amsterdam, but it allowed us to get acquainted with the different systems that are used in the various train stations. We were off, little did we know that stairs would become a constant in our trip of traveling Europe.