Hey, Ho, Let's Go!!!

So, the lyrics to the Ramones were stuck in my head all day yesterday and today during travelling down from Manchester to London after the ASE conference as we prepared to fly out to Paris. Catalin had a bad experience with Air France, (they lost his luggage !!!!) and after numerous irrate phone calls to the aforementioned company, after landing in Paris we FINALLY had the chance to file the claim in the baggage area to track where that pesky suitcase had disappeared to.

Our next mission was to find coffee and food. I’ve just discovered that the coffee shop in the centre  of Charles de Gaulle airport in terminal 2 does the nicest Capuchino’s this side of the English Channel.

After an afternoon of playing find the hotel we managed to arrive via a really friendly taxi driver who decided to ring the hotel to find the address and dropped our gazillion pieces of luggage off safely. Our hotel, quaint but needing a facelift, is very amusing. Directly oppposite my hotel room is another room in the process of being redecorated. Bizarre! I managed to refrain from tripping over the rolls of wallpaper to get to the door and i’m fairly pleased with what will be home for the next 12 days.

We decided to explore the area and to track down the UNESCO buildings which would host the press conference tomorrow morning and to familiarise ourselves with the area. I can’t get over the fact that there is a replica of the Blackpool Tower sitting in the middle of Paris. Woops, sorry,the Eiffel tower looks smaller than I imagined, but is still an impressive site once spied for the first time.

Spot the difference… which is which?

When spotting the giant sized planetarium and the ESA truck outside a block of offices, we figured that we had reached the UNESCO buildings. It was a strange feeling walking up the drive way as it felt that finally IYA 2009 was here and it was a bit surreal. After spending the best part of last week with 3000 science educators at the Association for Science Education conference and running the Galileo Teacher Training workshop, being in Paris finally began to sink in.

On reaching the reception at UNESCO we asked if we could visit the press room to find out where the information would be handed out tomorrow for the opening ceremony. We were chauffered to the back of the exhibition hall where a tired and stressed out Pedro greeted us and wished us a happy new year. As IYA Secretary he had his hands full with getting everything prepared for tomorrow. Mariana and Lee were sat in the back room typing away furiously and taking phone calls to make sure that there were no last minute hitches. Behind us sat hundreds of bags packed and ready for the delegates waiting to be handed out.

We took some photos of the exhibition being set up and chatted to Douglas Pierce-Price (Education and Public Outreach Officer for ESO) who was battling with setting up various pieces of the exhibition stand.

Content with our photographs and full of thoughts for writing the articles for the science newspaper and the astrokit, we decided to head back to base (the hotel) and begin preparing for the press conference in the morning. Its now approaching 11pm and its time for me to sign off and wake up early to head over to the press desk for a 8am. More updates on the IYA 2009 Opening Ceremony tomorrow! Oh, by the way, I’ll report on this in another blog but we’ve just launched the science newspaper and the Astrokit* .