Au revoir Paris

Today we flew out of Paris, bringing an end to our six month adventure. It's gone by incredibly quickly, but I always knew it would, so I can't say I'm too surprised.

Our flight was at 11AM, so we wanted to make sure we left plenty early to deal with any French traffic that came up (luckily we're going against traffic so we had that going for us). I got us one last crossaint from our 1 minute away boulangerie (oh how I'm going to miss fresh bread so close by!) we finished our packing and met our cab downstairs. That is one thing that really annoys me about cabs in Paris though, is the meter starts when they start driving to your flat. So even though we requested a cab for 7:15, that meter started running at 7:05.

After paying a ridiculous amount of baggage fees (even 1 extra bag on British Airways is ridiculous, and 2 extra.... wow!) we were checked in and through security. After a mostly uneventful flight except for Kara being kicked in the back by the kid behind her the entire time (and his parents doing nothing at all about it) we went through the mess at Heathrow, but with plenty of time to spare. The flight over to the US was uneventful (watched American Hustle, Dallas Buyers Club, and About  Time, which I'd all recommend) and went through the new immigration process where you scan your passport at an automated kiosk which takes your photo and gives you a printout to just hand to the immigration official. For some reason Kara's was marked though, so we had to go through the usual immigration process.

There has been a little bit of reverse culture shock, just in how incredibly spread apart everything is. Parking lots are gigantic, cars are gigantic, and food servers are SO FRIENDLY!!! No longer have to ask for re-fills, and getting them free, is kind of blowing my mind. And US money feels really weird, like it's fake. I've joked about how Euros seem like Monopoly money because it's so colorful, but US bills seem so bland and weird feeling that it's almost hard to believe it's a real currency. And our coins feel different...