Dilly of Weather

Have Breakfast, Or Else!

Paris:- Monday, 22. December 2003:- A wiggly line has been drawn through Paris today. To the west of the line the sun is peeking out from behind a non-threatening cloud. To the east of the line there is a cloud, also looking non-threatening, but it is dropping little, round white snow balls.

Right on the spot where I was yesterday, in Troyes. After a weekend there of getting rain in the face, I returned to the city so that I can experience tomorrow's weather. Today's weather dropped the little white balls in several places in France but Paris wasn't one of them.

Both Le Parisien and tonight's TV-weather news agree that Tuesday's weather will be a dilly.

From the west there will be a whole wall of rain that is pushing this way. Just to the east there will be a wall of clouds dropping little white balls on eastern France, from the northern border to about halfway down, to about Lyon I guess.

In theory Paris will be between these two walls. If the western one moves further east, or the eastern one slops a bit the west, Paris might have some kind of a dilly of weather. Other than this danger, the temperature should rise to seven degrees from a low of one.

Oddly, for Wednesday, it looks like the western wall of mucky weather might recede in the direction of the Channel. I mean, who ever heard of this before? But I am not making it up. In the east, all of those clouds dropping white snowballs seem to have turned to fog, with maybe one little ray of sunshine.

For Thursday, Christmas Day, we might have the vertical line again, kind of arcing westwards towards La Rochelle. In the north there are black clouds lying against the line while in the south they are innocent-looking white clouds, dropping snowballs.

To the east of the line, the weather map is blank. Quite a way east of Paris there is a design of fog, and north of it - somewhere near Luxembourg - there's a sunball peeping out from behind a cloud. Way south of the eastern fog part, there's a weaker sunball.

But right on the line slicing through Paris, there's nothing special. Today's Le Parisien says the low will be zero and tonight's TV-weather news said the high will be eight degrees. The paper calls it, a "Drôle de Noël."

If all of Thursday's weather converged on Paris, it would be another dilly.

Café Life

If you think sitting in a warm hotel room in the 'centre of Troyes' at 20:00 on Saturday night and watching the same old France-2 TV-news and weather is exciting 'Café Life,' then you are mistaken.

Being in a warm hotel room with a cable-TV, I could have been watching any of a dozen other TV channels. However, I have seen cable-TV before and never can find anything to watch except re-runs of Jay Leno. These are only interesting because the European version leaves out the US commercials.

After two hours and 20 minutes of cable-channel switching, the only thing I found to watch was a krimi in German. From what I could hear, it was not interesting and from what I could see, it was very uninteresting.

Odd then that I slept for about 12 hours and missed the hotel's breakfast. In a French town this can be a bad non-non. While the hotel's price of 9€ for an all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast - no ham, no eggs, no pancakes, no waffles, no sausages, no steak-frites - might seem extraordinarily expensive, take my word for it and never pass one of these up!