Back From France...and Very Sleepy

Thanks so much to Rick Klaw for guest-blogging so diligently while we were gone. We're now back--got in late last night--and very, very tired. Normal blogging will resume tomorrow.Perhaps needless to say, but...we very much enjoyed Nantes and our brief time in Paris. Utopiales was a blast--in fact, I hate to say it but I think Utopiales really sets the bar high for excellence in a lot of different ways. I saw many, many innovative processes and ideas that I thought would go over great at a US convention. We also enjoyed meeting so many interesting writers, translators, editors, etc.The only bad thing is that this was my convention schedule the first four days:Thurs - Badly jetlagged, 9am to 9pmFri - Sick from both ends, 9am to 9pm (food poisoning)Sat - Febrile and kinetic from relief that the Thursday programming had endedSun - No longer energetic, but at least not doing the Thurs programming again.Anyhoo...Jules Verne Museum, mechanical elephants, corpses as art, and much else to report on, but for now...Just a few random thoughts before I go back to sleep....If you're going to have a tour of a castle in Nantes, let it be by someone like Se(r)bastien Bonnet, an English instructor, who gave us the modern, updated, cool version, and then led us to a local bar that just happened to feature wonderful local beer and a North African singer who was amazing.If you're going to take a wrong turn on a Paris street, I suppose you could wind up somewhere less pictureque than by a kind of huge sandstone arch led up to by a street full of rather mature and husky prostitutes. (I really thought they were just shop owners taking a break, but they were, in fact, prostitutes not taking a break.)If you've spoken rudimentary French all day and are asking a film theater cashier if the movie is dubbed or subtitled, don't lapse into English so as to avoid this beat-down: "You could at least be polite. You are not in your large, shiny home country now." (Hey--maybe we were the twelfth American couple to revert to English that day; anyway, once we had left and come back a few minutes later armed with as much French as we could muster, she was very nice, and it turned into a very pleasant experience. Other than that, the French were all either nice or amused by our crappy French.)If you see a group of demonstrators for a local union on the Parisian streets, walk in the other direction instead of right at them, because a trampling may ensue.And, now, sleep....P.S. Got most of the rough draft of my Jack Vance story, "The Three Quests of the Wizard Sarnod," done on the plane ride back...