This is officially the final post in this bloggy-thingy

Last day in Paris can be summarized thusly:

There was some stuff I thought I might mail home, but I was too lazy to do that, so I stuffed everything into the bags:

The trash bags, obviously, are trash; the Ikea bag is stuff I took to the MICEFA office for their magic basement full of things for studentses to use.

The final incarnation of the showerhead:

Which was, of course, properly removed and cleaned up. Not a trace of adhesive left on the wall:

Aren’t I conscientious?

Well, the person doing the outgoing state-of-the-room assessment didn’t think so. I spent about 1.5 hours, all told, scrubbing away with a sponge and the Mister Propre wipes. No-go. I’m being billed €44 for cleaning, taken out of my room deposit. No, I didn’t get it spotless, but come on, people! What do you expect, I should go buy an industrial-strength mop and cleanser just to clean my floor this one time? Not that that would have satisfied them; the lovely lady filling out the form shook her head and muttered “Sale!” at the stains on my bathroom floor that have been there all semester and resisted several concerted efforts at their removal.

The plane rides from Charles de Gaulle to Heathrow and Heathrow to JFK were uneventful. I learned that it is much easier to go through airport security in the winter, when one has a coat and pockets to put stuff it. I also watched the movie of Watchmen, which was rather simplified from the book (which I’d read, way back, on my way to Paris), but pretty good. Though it did switch around one of my favorite lines, near the end, giving it a somewhat different meaning. Probably because they wanted the movie to have something sort of resembling a hopeful ending. Also watched The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, mostly to counteract the effects of the absolutely abysmal Robert Ludlum novel, The Prometheus Deception, that I’d picked up at CDG; I just wanted to remind myself that spy thrillers need not be absolutely idiotic, since Ludlum’s prose in The Prometheus Deception makes a compelling argument for scrapping the entire genre.

Anyway…

My room upon arriving and unloading all my bags:

It had been all nicely tidied up for me before arriving, too. Yeah. 5 months’ worth of stuff can rapidly un-tidy a place.

Unpacking garment bag. I didn’t have to wear anything in this bag (dress shirts, suit, ties) for the whole duration of my stay, but it was good to know the stuff was there, just in case, getting spectacularly wrinkled in the back of my closet.

So now I’m back. I’ve had fun riding the MTA subways again (I hadn’t noticed, while in Paris, that many French subways aren’t air-conditioned), walking around without danger of getting lost, and eating non-French food, and all those things that are hard to do in Paris. I haven’t taken any pictures of that. I have, however, taken a picture of my computer gloriously plugged in, directly, no funky adapter-thingy:

Innit grand?

That’s all, folks. Nothing exciting going on anymore.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 5th, 2009 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.