I arrived in Paris on a rainy morning to watch the final stage of Lance Armstrong's final Tour de France. I had five hours to kill, but the rain threatened my well laid plans of wandering around Paris until the race started. I took the Metro to the École Militaire and walked around into the Parc du Champ de Mars. The rain slackened off by then so I was able to take a couple of pictures. At 10am on Sunday, even such a heavy tourism day as the end of the Tour, the only other people were about 20 Japanese tourists in a group.

I passed some cops who couldn't speak any English and asked them where the Tour was passing through. I don't speak French, but oddly enough, with the use of hand signals and name dropping of landmarks that I knew, I was able to understand the cops perfectly. Or at least enough to know that they were giving me completely bad information. If I were standing on Market Street in San Francisco and someone from China asked me where to find the Fillmore, and I didn't know where it was, I wouldn't immediately point them towards PacBell Park just to try and be friendly. That said, those were the friendliest non-American cops I'd ever met.