Without the Internet to alleviate my boredom, I had to turn to my other hobby: photography. This afternoon I borrowed our car, as well as my Mom, and headed up to the village of Eze. There, we spent an hour or so climbing around the medieval village taking photos. Unfortunately the day wasn’t as clear as I had hoped and the sun was already setting, but I did manage to take a few good photos. They’ve been added to the gallery I set up for the Winter Break.
As I write this entry, I have no idea when it will be posted. Today, our phone line took a turn for the worse and is currently out of commission: no dial tone. As you may have already known, we’ve been experiencing large amounts of noise on our line caused by a storm many months ago. While it had only affected our ADSL connection, today’s problems effects everything. Apparently, some connection at the controle centrale has been severed and needs to be corrected. What this ultimately means is that for the time being, we have no way of making or receiving telephone calls and of course means that we have no Internet. As we forgot to activate international service on our Cingular cell phones, we’re reliant on the public telephones located in town. Nice, huh?
Overall, I’ve been very disappointed with France Telecom this break. We’ve been getting the run around and in addition, it just feels that they are incompetent. We’ve had two or three scheduled appointments to get us back on the grid but either they forget to bring the equipment or just don’t show up. It seems that 10 16, their telephone number has become permanently engraved in our recent call list! Oh well, here’s to hoping that we get a noise-free, reliable line in 2006.
An open-ended question to those of us still living in France. Has anyone had any experience with Neuf Telecom or Free? Our one year agreement with Wanadoo comes to an end during the first week of January and we’re interested in either reducing costs (neuf charges 14,99 euros a month for DSL in lieu of the 19,90 we’re paying now) or increasing service (Wanadoo Live? Freebox? Neufbox?). Any comments would be greatly appreciated! Merci.
Update: Looks like our telephone line/ADSL is back up, witnessed by this post.
I’ve been back in France now for about a week and a half now. Over the past ten days, I’ve spent a lot of time transitioning back into the French lifestyle. Baguettes, cheese, and wine are just a small part. As such, I’m now ready to make some observations, and with this post you’re about to read, we’re going to start a new column, Battle of the Cultures. This might be a lofty goal but I’d like to write a bit about the different cultures I’ve grown up in. We’ll see whether or not it continues, but here at least is Part I. If there are any topics you’d like me to touch upon, just leave a comment or contact me and I’ll try and include it for the next edition. In this edition:
Yesterday, I treked up to Mont Boron, the castle that overlooks both Nice and Villefranche. It was a superb day (well, at least on the Villfranche side) and I was able to grab a couple of panoramic shots of the bay. I’ve added them to the gallery I set up for this break and you can see each of the four pictures by clicking on its respective link.
You can see all the photos from the set by visiting the Winter Break 2005 gallery.
Just a head’s up: I’ve updated the journal’s backend to WordPress 2.0 and am still ironing out a few of the kinks (mostly related to permissions and incomplete uploads). While nothing should really change on your end (read: the reader), the administrative section has undergone a makeover, is now Web 2.0 friendly, and generally works a bit better. More soon…
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