Episode 544: Et On Commence...

I'm always grateful to hold a Singaporean passport when I travel. It just opens so many doors. Someone on the tour got turned back at Dover because she didn't have the right visa to travel into the EU. (I don't need one, a fact I somewhat foolishly only bothered to confirm after I'd booked the tour.) No idea which country she's from though. So I finally got to see the white cliffs of Dover, although with the border control buildings in place, it really isn't that inspiring a sight. I can imagine it must have been though, back before we dumped all this concrete to block the view. I've actually, surprise surprise, made polite conversation with someone today, a young Australian lady who's travelling overseas for the first time, finally making the trip she chickened out of two years ago. There's a poem in that, I'm sure of it, although I probably won't write it this time. The journey from Calais to Paris was okay, although I did have a headache most of the way because of the ferry. Along the way, also managed to discover that someone else on the tour shares my name! Finally, how's this for a tweet deserving of #FML? My roommate in Paris is a Korean who speaks practically no English. I don't know how to make my English broken enough, so we communicate mostly by him muttering in Korean and occasionally breaking into English, while I look benignly puzzled and patient. In any case, it's inspired me to write the third section of what I think is an interesting three-part poem. To end the day, we did a night tour of Paris in the coach, making a stop where we could get a good view of the Eiffel Tower. It was raining pretty heavily though, which made photography kind of difficult. The umbrella touts were also pretty annoying! I'm so glad that touting isn't really a problem in Singapore, apart from say, the hawker centre at Newton Circus.