In Paris we have no car... that means we have to walk to get our groceries. This might sound like a lot of work, carrying bags and bags of heavy groceries halfway across town.  Except that there is a grocery store every few blocks in Paris. Not huge supermarkets, just small local grocery stores that still seem to carry everything you need. So, since I don't want to carry bags full of food, I just end up popping down to the grocery store every few days to pickup anything else we need, or stopping on the way back home. We end up eating more fresh food (no more frozen stuff), getting more exercise and no longer dread epic grocery store trips. Maybe the tiny Parisian fridges help as well. 

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After a great week in London, we boarded the Eurostar to Paris. Traveling on the train at 250 MPH was a great way to go and the trip only took 2.5 hours. Unfortunately there was no Wifi on the train and no checked luggage, so the luggage area is a bit of a mess and worrisome that someone could just grab your bag before you get to it. 

We arrived in the afternoon and walked about 10 minutes to our first apartment. As we booked online, we didn't want to commit to a place for the whole month without first seeing it, so we booked our first place for just one week. And a good thing too, the next day we heard a horror story from another traveller who prepaid for a few months and ended up at a terrible apartment she couldn't even stay in (and didn't get her money back).

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We had a great time in London and had the opportunity to visit Stonehenge, Oxford and Windsor castle. It turns out that you can no longer go up close to the actual Stonehenge rocks and have to stick to a path on the perimiter. Too bad, I was looking forward to seeing what kinds of powers would be bestowed onto me when I stepped into the center of the circle. 

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We also got a chance to see an incredible Hindu temple that took over 14 years to build using traditional building techniques from Hindu scriptures. Much of the stone was flown in from India and it looks like there's still work to be done before the temple is finished. More info on this temple can be found here. 

OXFORD

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WINDSOR CASTLE

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Ok, on to Paris...

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Yup, in the UK sign up for a cell phone contract, get a free phone and a free "gift", ie: PS3, LCD TV, Wii, XBox, etc.. 

There's no catch, except that you can only get these deals from 3rd party stores that offer plans for all of the major providers. Our friends signed up for a 2 year contract, got a free Blackberry and 32" TV, their friends got an XBox 360. This won't work for a hot new phone like an iPhone 4S, but will work with last year's models. 

I can only assume that either something shady is going on here or these 3rd party stores get a big enough commission from each customer that they somehow make a profit. 

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Finally figured out the London Underground and although the system is very extensive and seems to be efficient, it uses the dreaded Zones to determine pricing. And boy does the Underground love it's zones.. so much that there are an insane 9 of them! I feel really bad for the poor people that live in Zone 9 and commute in to Zone 1. Basically the more zones you travel across the more you pay, but the problem is trying to figure out how much that is and which stations are in which zones.

To avoid pay for individual tickets everyday, we bought 7 day Travel Cards for zones 1-3.. at a station in zone 4! The ticket machines only gave us that option, brilliant. So we went up to the window and asked the attendant whether we could add zone 4 to our passes or pay an additional fare to use the Tube. After an extremely exaggerated sigh, he informed us that we can't do that but that we could cancel our passes and buy new ones.. only we'd lose about £15 on each pass (that we just bought 30 seconds ago) once we cancelled… Ok, so can we walk to the nearest station in zone 3 as we are on the edge of the zones? Sure, it's 45 minutes away… We finally worked out a bus that would take us to that station and was covered by our passes.

Oh and the Underground ticket machines or attendants did not accept any of our US credit cards (which worked everywhere else), so make sure you have lbs of Pounds on hand to buy your week long passes. Ours (zone 1-3) were around £35 each.

Once again the next day we ended up at another Tube station that was in Zone 4. We've now learned our lesson and will always check the station's zone before going there. Oh and make sure you don't accidentally travel on the Tube to a station in a zone you don't have access to, as you need to scan your card when exiting the station as well as entering and you won't be able to exit the station if your card doesn't cover that Zone. Good times, really fun for visitors and if you don't read English you're totally out of luck.

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We got into London Heathrow this morning after a long flight, and thanks to the crying/kicking baby behind us, it was a VERY long flight. The Air Canada plane was well equiped with power outlets, movies and grumpy flight attendents, basically the oppoisite of what air travel was apparently like in the days of 'Pan Am'. 

London was grey and rainy, which from what I hear is basically typical London. Good, we're getting the real London experience, and not some fake tourist-y sun.

Visited a local Polish shop and picked up some Pierogies as we get ready to spend the next week here. 

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Although last year's flooding in Thailand is making it difficult to get a hold of new Sony gear, I was finally able to get my hands on the new Sony A65 DSLR (SLT actually). No one except for Sony actually had them in stock, and even Sony didn't have any body-only versions, so I had to get the one with the cheap kit lens. 

So why choose a Sony DSLR over the other brands, especially when using it primarily for video? Well, for me it's the built-in stabilization, meaning that almost any lens I connect will be stabilized. Not everyone shoots as much handheld as I do, so that may not apply to everyone, but so far it's working out really well. The only hang up with the stabilization is that any lenses that require an adapter (like older manual focus lenses without electronic control) may cause the stabilization to not work correctly or at all as the camera will not know what type of lens you have connected, and it needs to know the focal length to calculate the amount of stabilization to perform. 

Other than that, the image quality is very good, it supports 1080p at 24fps and even 1080 at 60fps (although the compression at that rate is much worse), has a mic-in jack, and makes for a really good still camera as well. Another benefit is focus peaking that really helps you with manual focusing without the need for a magnified viewfinder like the Zacuto Z-Finder or the LCDVF. Speaking of focus, the camera supports auto focus during video, and although that's rarely used in pro video production, it's still a nice feature and thanks to the built in object tracking, it works really well.

The main downside of this camera is the lack of manual audio control, so it's back to the old days of the Canon 5DMK2 before it's audio control firmware update. Meaning I will have to record important audio with an external recorder, but that's usually safer to do than recording onto a DSLR as none of them offer a headphone jack (as of Jan 2012). Another potential issue is how delicate the foldout LCD screen's connection is, I fear that it may break off easily if you are not careful. 

Comparing to the other major (low-cost DSLR) players, the A65 does not appear to be as sharp and crisp as the Panasonic GH2 and I prefer the colors/look produced by the Canon 5DMK2 (but with a little color grading the A65 footage looks great too). Still none of those have built-in stabilization or focus peaking, so it looks like Sony has finally entered the DSLR filmmaker game. 

I'll be sure to post up images and videos from this camera over the next few months as we travel in Europe. 

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Getting ready for the trip by packing up our apartment and clearing off my desk. Now that there is actually some space on my desk it feels like a much better workspace, wish I had cleared everything off years ago!

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