Goodbye England

Time to say goodbye to England. But don't worry, the blog will remain in English The Kings Arms was pretty good to us, so we bid it a fond farewell as we head out early...

It is a couple of metro stops to the international train station where we have to go through customs and passport control (don't think that I have ever done that for a train before). The Eurostar train is smooth and it is a nice trip to Lille, France.

Once we get to Lille, it gets a bit more confusing.... do we take the metro, tram? which set of ticket machines to use? We find a very nice and helpful worker - who doesn't speak any English, but gets us to the correct ticket machine, correct elevator to the platform. But the entry to the metro is not just a simple pass-through, have to go in and close doors behind you - and we have 1 ticket for the 6 of us to pass around. About 3 people in, we seemed to have goofed it up - and we are out of entries or something. Phil is stuck inside - but a very nice stranger gets him through. Dean goes back up to buy more tickets and the very nice worker stops him and shows up downstairs to get me and Dean through...

Another hiking adventure to our apartment - about 50 steps again, but this time up a spiral staircase carrying our luggage. The group is beginning to think this is a boot camp I fear...

Luckily we could get in early and dropped off our luggage and headed out to explore (and eat!). Dean got to select the place since today is his birthday! He found a great place right on the CDG square/place. We had a great waiter, again very friendly and helpful. The place was very beautiful as was the bell tower. It's a rainy Sunday, and Lille is a bit of a sleepy town - many things are closed. I'm not sure we understood what this green-parrot-dragon thing was either (other than very interesting of course)...

We found and bookstore, more of a mini flea-market centered on media (books, posters, prints, etc.). Though "outside" it was all covered from the rain.

A bit more exploring despite the rain - we discovered huge colorful statues of all different kinds of "creatures" - presumably for the Mexican festival week going on and got better oriented with the city. Next was a search for ice cream/dessert - between hiding from the intermitent rain, we did end up at the Waffle place to get waffles filled with sugar or chocolate - extremely tasty...

As it was starting to rain harder, we decided to head back to the apartment when I heard someone call my name... Dean, Phil and Kate had found a nice pub to watch the game at - Sir Winston - which Dean would come to fall in love with - and begret the fact that he could not get one a shirt from...