Jan 07 2009
The City of Lights
My wife Kim and I are privileged from time to time to travel outside of the United States. This time we find ourselves in Paris, France to attend the 200th birthday celebration of Louis Braille, the inventor of the raised dot reading and writing system used by people who are blind.
Kim will be presenting on her new book “Drawing With Your Perkins Brailler”. The book includes 36 graphics created by entering strings of spaces, letters and symbols, similar to the graphics that can be created by typing a series of print letters. With Braille there are additional challenges because the dots are arranged in two columns of three dots. This makes making curves very difficult.
We are attending this conference with our friends Judy and Doug from Virginia. We are all blind and use dog guides from the Seeing Eye in Morristown, New Jersey. Each of us had to get special health certificates from our dog’s veterinarians so that they might enter France. As it turned out, we were never asked to produce the documents the law requires that we have.
As of this point, we have been in Paris for four days and have ventured out of the hotel every day. We went out to dinner to two different restaurants, taken a short ride on the Metro and gone shopping at a local grocery store. The people have been friendly but many of them do not speak English any better than any of us speak French. We have been lucky enough as of this point to find an English speaker of sorts each time we needed one.
Our only real problem to this point was the loss of my computer bag when arriving at the hotel. Kim and I took a taxi from the airport and our driver did not speak English. When we got out of the taxi, Kim went to the door of the hotel followed by a hotel employee who also did not speak English. He took with him four of the five bags we came with while I was paying the taxi driver. When it was our turn to check in to the hotel, there were only four bags; my computer bag had left with the taxi driver. He had not given me the receipt I had asked for so we had no idea how to find him.
A friend of Judy’s here in Paris spent some time trying to track down my bag but none of us had much hope. The morning of our second day, however, the taxi driver and a hotel employee showed up at my room with my computer bag in hand. What a relief! I gave him a large tip even though he did not want to take it. Everything was in the bag right where I had placed it. I am now typing this blog entry using my lap top with my PDA downloading the day’s newspapers. What a wonderful feeling.
Today we will be going out shopping and end the day having a meal at Judy’s friend’s house. It is cold and damp but we are in Paris so everything is an adventure. What more can you ask for?