A different tour!

It is a custom in our department at work, to give a tour of some interesting sites to new employees. I missed the tour first time, so I took part on Wednesday. They took us to Sheriff Museum, court, Jail and bomb ranger (the place that Sheriff Department disarms bombs and cooperate with military).
When we went to jail, we had tour of different sections of jail and we also passed by some inmates. I was sad and felt sorry for the inmates, although some looked like a real criminal, but I think that most of them are victims of society, most probably they have been born and raised in low level, dysfunctional families and they were on their own on the streets from the early childhood. So they joined gangs and were attracted to bad people and before they knew it, they were involved in different crimes.

Statistics shows that the societies that people have more or less same level of life and are
Less poor or have governments that does not let poverty overcome its own citizen’s lives, like Scandinavian countries, the crime rate is lower.
The thing about US is, that every one has opportunity to have at least minimum wage job or go to school by getting loans, but most of criminals are usually from families and groups of people that have less education and are poor, of course when you don’t have some one to help you to make right choices, it is hard to go after the right opportunities.
I think government can have programs to educate poor people more and provide their kids more social support and guidance.
I am not saying that there are not social supports but they are not enough. The other thing can be that there are lots of different races and cultures in this country and unfortunately some groups abuse the social benefits if you give them as much benefit as some European countries offer to their people.
I myself think, in general every thing starts from family, the chance that a kid who is born and raised in a decent educated family turns to a criminal is very low. So if governments in all over the world work on keeping family structures more strong through different plans and programs and try eliminate poverty as much as possible, the crime rate definitely goes down.

Any way I was praying in my heart the whole time that we were taking the tour that no one that I know never goes to jail!
It was a different experience and made me more grateful for being free and have a decent life!!
The bomb ranger was something that I did not like much, it was a place that they disarm bombs that military uses for training or so. They had all sorts of selections of bombs there. I hate every type of bomb and weapon. I hope one day UN becomes so strong that they can stop producing bombs and weapons all over the world!

Routine Life

Sweet vacation mood is all over and I am back to routine again. As I said before the best part of vacationing is getting a way from routine and day to day life.

-The new challenge that I am facing these days is potty training my son, may be that sounds funny but it is real a challenge. It’s about time that he needs to be toilet trained especially because he will start pre-school in August. Unfortunately he is kind of resistant to this new thing. He seems to be still comfortable with diaper!! I have used tricks like reward bag and stuff since last week. Some times he does it some times he has accident and sometimes says that he does not want to use bathroom and prefers to do it in pants or pull ups!! Any way they say you should not pressure it but if I don’t take it seriously may be it takes 6 months for him!! Some parents say that they were successful with their kids in a matter of one long weekend. They must be very lucky!!

-It is the world cup time and my husband is so much into it. He took off the first week of world cup so he would not miss any game!! Iran did not do good and most of Iranians were very disappointed, the thing is it was not all about being physically ready or tactics although we are of course behind from European teams or South America in regards of physic and tactic but they say there were lots tension in team’s camp as well, and the coach did not do a very bad job for changing players or picking the right ones it was mostly by favors.
I think so far Germany is doing very well. I personally like Germany and Italy, Italy somehow for their good looking players though!!!

Pictures

Norway(Oslo)


Spain (Barcellona)

























Paris, Louvre

Vacation (Part2)

On Fifth day of our vacation we headed to Montpellier with the fast trains which are called TGB in France, the distance between Paris and Montpellier is 9 hours drive but with the fast train it just took us 3 hours to get there. My husband was so exited to see his cousins, 4 of his cousins live there and two other cousins had come from Italy and Netherlands to see us. They all used to be neighbors back in Iran when they were bunch of young kids. My husband especially was very close with one of them, we stayed at his house, he had a big house and the other cousin from Netherlands with his wife and three kids were staying there too. The host himself had 2 kids, 9 and 11 years old and the other cousin’s kids were 5 to 1.5 years old. Just imagine the scene of kids all together. The first day was a tense day for me because kids did not get a long and I was all the time watching my son to make sure that he does not get in fight with other kids or not to break any thing or do any thing bad. I am very conscious when we are at people’s house I really don’t want my son to destroy any thing or do any thing inappropriate, so that makes me nervous! My husband’s cousin wife was French but she could speak English and a little bit Farsi. I felt sorry for her to have all that guests at the same time at her house, especially the noisy kids!! Any way we stayed there 4 days and met with other cousins too. They are all very nice people and they had lots of memories to review together!

We went to Barcelona with my husband’s cousin, it was just 4 hours a way from Montpellier. I really loved it there. It was a beautiful city with fabulous buildings, the architecture of the city was amazing. They say Barcelona, is number one in architecture in Europe! And they must be right about it! The food was very good and I love the stores too. I bought two very nice dresses there. We stayed there for two full days and we enjoyed it a lot.
We were planning to go to Italy too, but we thought that would be too much for my son, so instead we went to South France, Saint Maxim and Saint Tropez. Our flight to Norway was from Nice, so that would be smoother plan rather than going to Italy and come back to France. I really liked Saint Tropez, it was very cute city, I wish I would win lotto and I would buy a summer home in one of those tiny streets close to the ocean!
Any way we had a good time in South France and two of my husband’s cousins were with us too. It was so nice of them to come with us, the cousin that we stayed with and is the closest to my husband took off all this time from work to be with us. We invited all of them to come to US and be our guest. I was joking with my husband and telling him” what would happen if all the people we have invited so far decide to come in the same summer??”

Any way we flew to Oslo and were well received by my aunt (my father’s sister) whom I am very close with. She is one of the kindest people I have ever known. She is just 42 years old, younger than my older brother! She came with her son-in-law!! Her daughter got married when she was 19!! We visited my uncle (my father’s brother) as well. One of my cousins came from England and now it was my turn to be surrounded by my cousins. It was so nice to see them all. We took a one day cruise to Denmark too and the night on the cruise was an unforgettable night, we were all drunk except my aunt! She was baby sitting my son.

This was the story of my trip to Europe. Although we faced challenges because of my son but we had a great time and it was well worth it. I think every one needs to take vacation at least once a year it does not matter were you go but being with family and friends or visiting a new place is important. And more important is getting a way from the routine life!!

Vacation (part 1)

I am finally back from vacation. We got back on Friday (June 12, 2006). It was a nice vacation full of adventures and challenges.
We flew to Paris first and my husband family friend picked us from airport, and took us to the hotel. He advised us not to sleep and just get out of the hotel as soon as possible so we could adjust with time faster. It was about 10: 00 am that we got in to the hotel. We listened to him and just walked to Eiffel Tower which was very close to our hotel, it was a long line but we got lucky to see a very nice Iranian couple who amused us during the line and entertained our son too!! It was a nice day and from the top of the tower we could see all Paris!
The following day we visited Louver Museum, Notre dam Church and Cartier Latin you can imagine that it was a long day to visit all these places, but we wanted to use of our time as much as we could. Louver was absolutely fantastic, we spent about 4 hours there, Iran section was marvelous and I got really emotional when I saw the those Perse Polis statues in perfect shape there, we hardly have them as perfect in Iran, the ones in Iran are mostly broken and not in original shape. There were so many antic dishes and stuff from Iran, the stones with ancient writings and paintings. I am glad that they take a good care of our stuff in Louver! Egypt had so many great things there too. The Paintings and statute section were absolutely fabulous, they all took breath out of me and at the same time we should have taken care of our son too, he was getting bored and we used all the tricks to keep him quite, although he got really crazy at the end.
My husband got crazy by taking pictures.
Notre Dam church was very beautiful and great. I remembered the part of the book about Napoleon that described his crown ceremony in the Notre dam. After Notre Dam we went to Cartier Latin, It was beautiful there too!
On our third day in Paris we went to Champ’s Lessee and I did some shopping, although it was expensive but it was worth it, we visited Mon Marte (which is a place that artists get to gether and you see them painting all over the place, it had lots of romantic and nice restaurants and has a great view to the city) in the afternoon and we loved it there, unfortunately we could not have dinner in one of those romantic restaurants because my son was too tired! The 4th day we visited the grand palace, petite palace and Napoleon grave and museum.
I have read some books about Napoleon, his life and destiny was always so interesting to me, so when I was in “tombre de napoleon” place I was remembering the things that I had read about his life. It is so interesting to know or read about the places before you visit them.
Any way we had four full days in Paris, nice and challenging in regards with my son but we tried to make the best of it. It is a very beautiful city but I should write the negative things about it also, the first negative thing that got my attention about the city was that I expected Paris to be more clean, I can tell that it was kind of a dirty city, you could see trash on the ground every where, the metro system is really good and convenient over there but they did not have good facility for handicaps and kids with stroller some stations did not have escalators so we should have carried my son in stroller when we were going back and forth on stairs. The other negative thing was poor customer service, when we would go to a restaurant or café it would take a while for waiter to come and serve and they were not very nice and caring, at least my experience was not very good in regards of service. Most of people told us that French people don’t like speak in English and they are not helpful when you talk in English with them, I knew French before but I lost my practice since I moved to US so I practiced a little bit before the trip, I would start speaking in French and mix it with English whenever I needed and they were good at helping about address and direction. So my experience with Parisians was not bad at all in regards of helping with address and directions!
The thing is we went from US to Europe and here especially in California we get spoiled with the very clean cities and fantastic customer service, may be for people that travel from other parts of the world to Paris, it does not look that dirty or the customer service looks OK to them but for us was kind of poor! one more thing that I should add and probably every one already knows is that Paris is a very expensive city!! in some areas we paid 6 Euro for one coffee!! Now you do the math!!
Any way in overall I really liked Paris and I already miss it.
I will try to put more pictures here as soon as I have all my pictures sorted out.



I write about my rest of trip in future posts soon!