Ready, Set, Go!: Two Weeks In Paris On A Shoestring Budget
Tomorrow night, I take the train to Paris.
Even as I write those words I can hardly believe it.
Originally, Paris was going to be a one day layover-a whirlwind stopover on my way somewhere else.
But two things happened: I left England early, giving me a lot of time in France; and, I have to go to Paris to get my visa for India.
Getting the Visa for India has turned out to be somewhat complicated.
I should have expected this, but for some reason, it still surprised me.
Basically, I have to go to Paris, and visit the embassy a few times, just to get the whole process going. Then it could be a snap, or it could take a month!
So, I have a real reason to go to Paris for several weeks!
Luckily for me, I have a friend who happens to live in Paris that I can stay with.
Luckier still, I am on a limited budget.
Why is that lucky?
Well, I guess I consider it a challenge, to spend two weeks doing inexpensive (read: often free) things in the City of Lights.
I’m hoping if I find enough inexpensive things to do, I will have the money to spend several days in the Louvre…as well as go for a steamy massage retreat at the Hamman(Turkish Baths) near the Arabic Mosque.
Finding free, or truly cheap things to do in Paris online has proven to be exasperating. Articles called, ” Paris for Two Hundred Dollars A Day”, “What To Wear While You’re In Paris”, and ” Best Meals In Paris Under Fifty Dollars” come to mind.
The last time anyone went to Paris on a real budget and wrote about it was some time ago-I think it was called “Europe On Five Dollars A Day” or something like that.
There were actually a few good sites with suggestions for surviving on a budget in Paris, but they were mostly all listing off the same things. I’ve decided to get much more inventive with my time there, and I’ve come up with some surprising things to do that don’t cost anything at all-or at least, not much.
I have actually managed to come up with a list of over 100 free things to do in Paris!
What I plan on doing is actually doing all of them, and then writing about them when I’m all done.
I hope living on baguettes doesn’t get too tiresome!
I’ll talk to you all when I return to Rhemoz, France in a few weeks.
gigi
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Astronomers briefly thought Elon Musk’s car was an asteroid. Here’s why that points to a broader problem
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Seven years after SpaceX launched Elon Musk’s cherry red sports car into orbit around our sun, astronomers unwittingly began paying attention to its movements once again.
Observers spotted and correctly identified the vehicle as it started its extraterrestrial excursion in February 2018 — after it had blasted off into space during the Falcon Heavy rocket’s splashy maiden launch. But more recently, the car spawned a high-profile case of mistaken identity as space observers mistook it for an asteroid.
Several observations of the vehicle, gathered by sweeping surveys of the night sky, were inadvertently stashed away in a database meant for miscellaneous and unknown objects, according to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.
An amateur astronomer noticed a string of data points in January that appeared to fit together, describing the orbit of a relatively small object that was swooping between the orbital paths of Earth and Mars.
The citizen scientist assumed the mystery object was an undocumented asteroid and promptly sent his findings to the MPC, which operates at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a clearinghouse that seeks to catalog all known asteroids, comets and other small celestial bodies. An astronomer there verified the finding.
And thus, the Minor Planet Center logged a new object, asteroid “2018 CN41.”
Within 24 hours, however, the center retracted the designation.
The person who originally flagged the object realized their own error, MPC astronomer Peter Veres told CNN, noticing that they had, in fact, found several uncorrelated observations of Musk’s car. And the center’s systems hadn’t caught the error.