morganphillipsland

In April my little sister will be in Paris, France, performing in this:

I’ll be in the audience. After much hemming and hawing over the expense, I managed to find a $404 (including taxes and fees!) round trip ticket on Continental that broke the back of the Camel of Indecision. As they say.

I haven’t been to Paris since high school, when I visited with the Paris ‘92 club. We did fundraisers for two or three years, then jetted off to the City O’ Lights to lose our collective innocence.

My memories of that trip are foggy, but lovely. Here are three:

-Resisting the advances of an “artist” who followed me around in the Pere Lachaise cemetery. He wanted me to accompany him back to his apartment, where he would “sketch” me. Bizarre and funny enough to not be scary, even as an 18 year-old on his first trip to a foreign land.

-Walking from one end of the city to another with a torn and incomplete map, alone, late at night, boldly breaking my school group’s curfew and buddy rule, because of a situation involving a transit strike and a young lady who’d needed to be walked home.

-Being asked for directions by American tourists on the Metro, and answering with a cartoonish French accent.

I’ve braced myself for things being less romantic and exciting now, since I’m no longer a wide-eyed teenager. However: it’s Paris. I’ll be able to rustle up a little excitement, I should think.

Any hot (cheap) tips for my Paris to-do list would be greatly appreciated. Along with (double cheap) hotel recommendations.

I scoffed at the woman at the Sprint store when she asked if I wanted her to walk me through my new phone’s basic features.  I shouldn’t have scoffed.

I have officially become old: I couldn’t figure out how to work the infernal gadget (Samsung’s “Rant”) without consulting the instruction manual.

In my defense, not including the main keypad or the magical slide-out QWERTY keyboard, there are 16 buttons.  Which is a lot.

This is the phone:

And this is an image of its owner, captured using the phone then uploaded via included USB cable (fancy!):

“Rant” is an odd choice of name for a piece of technology.  Anyone doing a web search for “samsung rant” or “sprint rant” is probably not going to get a result that Samsung or Sprint would be happy about.

Speaking of which, I’ve come to accept that Sprint is a terrible, evil company, and that they will try to screw me over at every turn.  Therefore it was not a surprise when I logged on to their website this evening and saw that I’d been signed up for a more expensive plan than the one I agreed to in the store.

I tried switching to Verizon at one point, but their signature mob of “Can You Hear Me Now?” fellows was apparently afraid of my basement.