Travel Etiquette

Let me tell you a little story.

One night in Paris, my good friend Carrie and I enjoyed a fantabulous meal in a little eatery where the waiter was kind and helpful considering our French was minimal at best. The service was amazing. We enjoyed every minute of it and when we were finished we nursed our wine and waited for our bill. And waited. And waited. This should not be taken to mean the service dropped off. Our waiter checked on us several times asking if we needed anything, but Carrie and I were too embarrassed to ask for the bill so we were waiting for him to just bring it to us. Something like 45 minutes later (I wish I were joking and we were not really this dense) Carrie finally got the nerve to ask for the bill. Once that happened, we immediately paid and left the establishment.

As soon as we returned to the room I looked through one of the travel guides and noted that in France, because meal times are so very important, it is expected that the customers must ASK for the ticket. They will literally let you sit there for hours before preempting the request.

So take my lesson with heart and find a site that will help you with the etiquette of the country you wish to travel to. It may save you lots of time and embarrassment. I have enjoyed the website http://www.traveletiquette.co.uk/ but if you have any others feel free to use. If we had used this before our trip we would have noted the following :)

When dining out, if you need to request the bill, you should never snap your fingers at the waiter or waitress. This is extremely bad etiquette and can translate as rude and arrogant. The best way to ask for the bill is to catch the attention of the waiter or waitress’s by making a writing motion, as well as saying “L’addition s’il vous plait”.

No Scrubs- Paris/London May 1999

It's funny how songs can take me back in time so fast! Today I heard they were discussing a reunion with the final 2 members of TLC (RIP Left Eye). After the announcement, the station played "No Scrubs" which threw me back in time to May/June 1999 when I took a group of seniors/juniors to Paris and London. This was popular at the time and we must have sung it 20 times on the trip. We sang it every time the rest of our tour group did something incredibly stupid (which was often)

Travel through 2009

Here is the list of the travel I plan to do trough the rest of the year:

October
San Francisco- My friend Janet is planning this one. I want to go on a hot air balloon ride and stay in the Wine Country but other than that I'm open. Oh and I'm doing the Nike Women's half-marathon on Sunday because I want that Tiffany necklace :)

December
Vegas, Baby. Craig and I have a little obsession with Vegas. Like this is our third trip this year and last year I went three times. We stay mostly at Planet Hollywood Resort. Now that I have this blog I'll start taking pictures. We are planning to attend National Finals Rodeo which is the rationalization for this trip. Usually we just go to get away from the kids :)

That's it for the rest of this year. I'm crossing my fingers that I get sent back to NY, NY for work. I can't wait to start planning that one. But that falls under 2010 and I'll list all those out later!

How I travel

So I love to travel and I wanted a place to document the sites I find and books I love. I tend to read dozens of books before I go on a trip. For my Rome trip last year I read 17 travel books (not counting the 3 books on how to speak Italian). Which I then systematically dismantled to create a travel book that was perfect for my trip.



See this trip was with my husband, Craig, and it was his first trip to Europe and he is picky picky picky about food so I had to map possible restaurants for each location of the city we might be located in at any point in time. I swear I spent more time mapping this than the Allies did planning D-Day. This is what I came up with:








It was an invaluable tool because I was able to slip it in my purse and reference it at any time, without taking up my suitcase with eleventy billion pages of travel speak. One would think that with all this planning we had a trip scheduled with every moment planned and you couldn't be further from the truth. While we did use Context Travel for a variety of tours (LOVE THEM and so wish they will open tours in Eastern Europe HINT HINT), other than that our time was free. We chose anything we did on the spur of the moment and let me tell you...being spontaneous TAKES PLANNING!.

Anyway that trip was so great that last night when we were talking about my possible future trip to NY, NY Craig said he would rather go back to Rome. YAY! Not that I want to go back there (because there are SO MANY other places in the world and so little time!!) but because he had so much fun I just might get him on a plane across an ocean again :)

So basically I plan plan plan...and then I do anything, everything or nothing!