On your mark, get set...

Wednesday was a much better day for working, which was a good thing, as this was our last day to prepare before the training session. Dave reviewed the materials I prepared, and I reviewed his. Then while Dave kept at it, I gave myself a little free time and headed up to Galeries Lafayette to do a bit of shopping. There were a few things Richard and I wished we would have bought when we were in Paris on vacation, and I went with the intention of picking them up. I also needed to purchase a belt, since I left home without one.

I had a small salad at the Galeries Lafayette café in the main store (an appetizer for my real lunch), then set off in search of the grocery store section, the gourmet spice section and a place to buy a belt. You’d think this wouldn’t be difficult, but the store is housed in at least 3 separate buildings. Finding the gourmet food store was easy enough, and actually on the way I managed to find and purchase a belt (both could be found in the men’s store). In the food store, I bought some fleur de sel and a sandwich made of Spanish Serrano ham. The sandwich also came with a cup of gazpacho.

Since there wasn’t really a place to eat, I got my food “to go,” found the other gourmet spice section (in the home store…yet another building). There I bought another kind of salt, this time in a salt grinder.

I headed back to the hotel and had lunch and got back to work. The ham on the sandwich was wonderful…very delicate in taste. It was quite a treat! The gazpacho was a very nice accompaniment. Work was…well…work.

Then at 6 pm, I dialed in to a meeting with Windows live messenger with folks on the east coast, in the midwest and the west coast. Despite the fact that Windows Live Messenger worked fine in the morning and the first part of the meeting, it decided to cut out every other second or so. So I became virtually unintelligible for the last part of the meeting. I resorted to Instant Messaging my comments to others on the call, who then spoke for me. Not ideal, but we were able to manage.

Dave and I went to a place called Zimmer for dinner. I had Sole Meuniere, one of the dishes that Julia Child talks about frequently in her book My Life in France (a great read). We had a couple of wonderful desserts…Dave had fraises Melba (strawberries and awesome vanilla ice cream) and I had poêlé de poire (literally fried pears, but that doesn’t describe it very well…the dish also included the awesome vanilla ice cream).

We then retired to finish up enough training material to get us through the first day...