Paris.It`s big. It`s beautiful. It`s stylish and fast and varied and everything people said it would be. We arrived on the TGV on Saturday after a trip through the French countryside at about the speed a plane goes just before take off. There were the immediate problems, on arrival, of figuring out exactly where we were and how we were to get to where we should be, but people are helpful and the Metro, once you figure it out, is amazingly efficient. We have a very lovely little apartment near the Bois du Vinciennes, about 15 minutes on the Metro from the centre of Paris, and we have been walking,walking,walking. In all our perambulations I didn't find an internet cafe until now,and this one uses continental keyboards, with the keys stylishly lit navy blue on black. It looks fantastic but it's extremely difficult to use.I've checked my email, and I'll pop back later to write something a little more substantial, although I don't think I'll be posting pictures until we get to England in June.
The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
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