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I'm planning to go to Paris for my vacation this year! I was considering the Burning Man festival but the poor accommodations put me off. I'm very excited about this because it will be a dream come true to visit my favorite foreign country. Maybe that is a ho-hum, routine matter for some people, but for me it is like getting the crazy idea to go to the moon!



It will be very expensive and now is not a good time for it but I think the IT industry is recession proof. To feel that you cannot afford something is just a mental block if you don't even bother to research the costs. I used to think travelling to foreign countries was too difficult and expensive for me but going on a few cruises made it seem more like a possibility. My point is that the possibilities are often limited by your own mental blocks rather than real limitations or lack of opportunities.



So I've been doing some research in order to be prepared for this trip. I'm considering an escorted tour so I won't need to find my own way around or interact too much with French people. I'm somewhat familiar with French but I can't really understand spoken French and I can only read a little. The Internet makes it easy to research the French culture. I can visit French versions of major web sites like Yahoo!, Amazon, YouTube, and Wikipedia. I can watch French TV news in my browser. YouTube has plenty of French lesson videos. And DailyMotion is the favorite video sharing site for France and Europe.



Today I used Google Street View to prowl the streets of Paris. This is really awesome because you can see a lot of impressive architecture. I can also examine the street signs and store windows to see what kinds of French words I need in my vocabulary.



There are a lot of things that are different in France that I'll need to know about. For example, electricity in France runs on 220-volt, 50-cycle AC current. So I'll need a european plug adapter to charge my electrical devices. Their time zone is Central European Time (CET). Their currency is now the Euro. They format dates differently than we do so I've found a French calendar widget to familiarize myself with that.