My Private Flight, Slovenia, Short Street & Election Night

I missed last Sunday's blog entry since I was traveling in Slovenia. Speaking of which, my flight from Paris to Ljubljana was one of the best travel experiences of my life. I was the ONLY passenger on the Air France Easter Monday early morning flight. That would have been enough but before takeoff, the captain opened the door and asked me if I wanted to fly up front in the cockpit. Of course I said yes and it was an unforgettable experience. If you're interested in learning a bit about Slovenia, I invite you to check out my photo expose at www.davidsilpa.com/slovenia/index.html. And one more thing about Slovenia - I saw an ad for beer there that was written in English and it described their beer as "sweet & useful".

I discovered a street near my apartment recently that really must be one of the shortest streets in the word - it's called rue du Fouarre and the entire street is this building. On both sides of the building the street has a different name. Only in Paris ...

Found out that Paris has a Meetup.com photographers group that regularly meets here. By chance, they were doing their monthly walk-a-round today so I joined them. There were about 20 of us that broke into 4 groups and walked around a part of the city and photographed what we saw. We then all went back to the organizer's apartment, ate lunch and looked at everyone's photos. It was a fun exercise with everyone there into photography but I don't think I'll learn much - most members weren't so advanced photographically.

And in France it was the first round of the Presidential elections here today. The system works like this: there are many candidates (usually a dozen or so) that run in this first round and then the top 2 vote getters go on to a run-off election in 2 weeks to decide who will be the next President. A group of my Italian friends organized an election night soiree to find out the results of the first round today. In France, it is illegal to report any election results or projections before 8pm of the election day, so we got together just before then and made (from scratch, tossing the dough in the air and all - see photo) and ate some pizza. The results of the election turned out as expected - Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal made it through to the second round. The only surprise was how high voter turnout was - around 85%, the highest in over 50 years.

And now a couple of photos from the week ...

His and Her wine called "Le" & "La"

A glass recycling truck from my bedroom window