Ooo Champs Elysee....

Wondering why I suddenly disappeared? Well, some time ago I made a promise to myself to maintain a work-life balance and to take a vacation every three months. So, I made a list of places I wanted to visit and last week it was time for ... Paris!

It's really hard to describe in just words how good I felt and what a great time I had. As a matter of fact, I had been in Paris a few times before, but it was only for a day and I had not come even close to appreciating all of its splendor and liveliness. This time I had a whole week to go sightseeing - I checked out the Eiffel tower, the Louvre, Arc de Triomphe, Pantheon, Royal Palace, Notre Dame and many other tourist attractions. Even though most of the buildings and museums I visited are a great cultural heritage and offer a lot to see and learn from - they were not as impressive as the Royal Palace in Versailles.

Versailles was a hunting lodge built by Louis XIII which later became an official residence of the Court of France (1682). The place is really humongous - apart from the chateau where you can comfortably fit a small town, there are also a couple of other smaller places (the Grand and Petit Trianon), an artificial canal, a park the size of Maine (joking) and a tiny village built per request of Mary Antoinette. It seems that she got excited about the life in the country and wished to be closer to nature and ordinary people:) Anyway, here's a link to the official website: <http://www.chateauversailles.fr/en/>. As a picture is worth a thousands words, I am putting some pics below so that you could see how beautiful everything is:


Pic 1: view from the Palace


Pic 2: Beautiful landscaping, hugh?


Pic 3: Picture of the Petit Trianon village


Pic 4: A beautiful swan


Pic 5: The palace seen from the boat I rented

I should say that my only disappointment was Euro Disneyland. It's not that bad of a place, don’t take me wrong, but to wait 2 hours for a 45 second drive is definitely not worth it. The rides with little or no wait were made for small kids... Hey, we are all still kids in some ways, but it's definitely hard to be impressed with some things when you get past the age of 7.

It will probably take me as much time as to write a book to be able to describe everything I've seen so I will be finishing this post with a recommendation to all who read it - definitely go to Paris in this lifetime! It's definitely worth it and is a good way to "format your hard drive" and forget about work for a change.

P.S. Balance the load… I can’t resist but quickly plug in a Telerik-related topic… We are on schedule! I am so excited to see that we have managed to successfully put out the public betas of our 5 new components, take the .NET 2.0 version in final QA testing as well as cater to our Sitefinity product, on which we are launching a progressively improved second version. Yes, all pots are boiling hot and I love to be back in the kitchen… I will see you on the counter in a minute:)