For reasons to be mentioned further down, this post is dedicated to Ilya Gennady Schwartzburg. May he forgive us all our trespasses.Today went really smoothly.  Almost.  We got up, left Ilya's keys with the front desk, got to the station on time, caught our train, had a nice ride and arrived in Bordeaux on time. After some initial fumbling around we found our hostel and made our way to the tourist office. Realizing that there wasn't really anyth...

What an interesting Shabbat it was. I, once again, forgot that people bring in Shabbat a lot earlier then the actual time here. It did not occur to me to check that until 8:20. What I saw, as I had feared, was that all of the Shuls had started between 7:15 and 7:30 even though candle lighting was not actually until 9:30. I lit my candles and ran to the Jewish area as fast as I could. When I got there I spotted some Chasidim getting into a car. "Oh ...

Scared s***less by yesterday's miscalculations, I sat down tonight to try and arrange hostels for the forseeable future in Bordeaux and Spain. Turns out that yesterday's catastrophe ended up saving us money and put us in line for comfortable availabilities at hostels for the next week. I arranged nice, cost-effective and relatively centralized hostels for Bordeaux, Madrid and Barcelona. Hostelworld.com is a great site. After my reservations they gave me a ran...

Today was a bad day. A very bad day. Poopy-diaper-esque in fact. A couple of mistakes ended up causing a total failure. Mistake #1: Waiting till two days or the day before to book hostels. Mistake #2: Not checking the train schedule before planning a spontaneous stop, say for example, in Bordeaux. Mistake #3: Sending one traveler to validate Eurail passes and make reservations for two. Mistake #4: Making all these mistakes on the day that your host is leaving the...

Getting up early for the museum was a good idea. So good everyone else in Paris had it too. We started to wait online when we noticed this door everyone was going through that said ticket sales. Knowing that they didn't sell same-day tickets I went to check it out anyways while Josh held our place on line (the two person line tackling bit has been a life saver). This is one time my stubborness has paid off BIG. I discovered something called the Paris Museum P...