New Year is the time when, except your empty cups, lots of peels of mandarins are starting to accumulate beside your computer...

Happy New Year! ;)

10:00
City sightseeing tour

Start point: Opéra de Paris

The next morning we came down for the breakfast and found in the lobby a kiosk looking like a mobile phones payment terminal with a big inscription on it which said: “The Internet – 2 Euro”. We wondered at it. Actually, we didn’t expect a stuff of the kind. “Hmm…”, we thought then, “we’d better find an Internet café outside than a kiosk”.
After eating our regular morning loafs, we picked up with us one more person from our group, who was living in the same hotel, and went together towards the Opéra for our first excursion – a bus tour around the city.
The route was something like that:
Opéra, Boulevards, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Latin quartier, Sorbonne, Panthéon, Jardin du Luxembourg, Les Invalides, Colonne Vendôme, Place de la Concorde, Palais Chaillot, Opéra

15:00
Fragonard

A marketing component

As it always happened during this sort of tours, there were some falsifications in your agency’s list of excursions instead of real ones, only to sell to you something needless that you were not going to buy in fact.
We visited that one. It was proudly named as the Museum of Perfume.
A couple of our precious hours in Paris were wasted just for nothing. We might have spent all the time in a better way and, for sure, we could have chosen a bit more established perfume than that vessel without a trace of any common brand.
So, if you have a choice, just choose for buying a store :)

18:00
Montmartre du soir

Montmartre funicular, Sacré Cœur, the streets of upper-Montmartre

14:50
Aéroport Charles-de-Gaulle

Meeting and group transfer

Luckily our guide was Russian, so we managed to get to our bus without any troubles. As we got to Paris, she escorted each piece of our group to help them with checking in their hotels. We had visited lots of hotels around Opera de Paris area when our bus stopped again. Last part of the group left the bus and there were only two passengers still inside: my husband and I. Our hotel was the next stop, the last one on the route.
- Où est votre bagage? - the driver asked me unexpectedly after he had helped all other tourists with their massive suitcases.
We two had with us just one small back pack. So, there was nothing ours in the baggage space.
I wanted to say that to him. I strongly remembered then that I might say "Je n'ai pas de bagage"...
But there were two of us. That fact spoiled all the impression about me. I realized I should find the correct form first.
And while I was going in my mind over all those "j'ai, tu as, il a, nous avons (oh! it's correct! next, the negative form…)" the driver finally lost his patience and went to find someone a bit cleverer.
At last we got to our place and went inside for checking in. The only demand of ours to the hotel, when the agency had been choosing for us one, was, of course, the Internet. We asked the guide to know if we could use Wi-Fi from our room. But the receptionist answered for some reason that we must go downstairs every time we want to use it. So, we decided to sort it out later.

17:30
First walk

Start point: our hotel, 37, Rue de Maubeuge

Firstly, we were going to find where the Opera de Paris was – it was our regular meeting point for excursions. We found, however, not only the Opera, but the Louvre palace, the Tuileries garden and the Concord place. It was getting dark then, but we continued our stroll and walked through the Elysees fields and found the Triumph arch too.
When we approached Seine's quay after that, Dimka became a bit upset goodness knows why... But at the moment I saw fairy shimmering lights at the Eiffel's tower across the river. It was wonderful and, surely, we went there too – we crossed the river and approached right up to the tower.
On the way home Dimka was already too warn out to pay any attention to the Chaillot palace, the Big and Small palaces and the Vendome column, but I, nevertheless, stopped every five minutes to take a picture.
Finding the Opera again and missing right streets and turns a couple of times, we finally managed to return to our hotel by about 11 pm I suppose, in spite of uncomplimentary opinion of my husband's about me and my talents in orienteering.

Ally

The name info

• Gender: girl
• Syllables: 2
• Characters: 4
• Pronunciation: AL-lee

Origin and Meaning

There are lots of discrepant versions of what the name does mean and where came from.
Here some of them are:

• The meaning of the name Ally is Friend, Partner. The origin of the name is English.
• Ally is French diminutive of Alison: A 13th century variant of Alice meaning nobility.
• The name is an Arabic variant of Allah - the Supreme Being in the Muslim faith. Meaning: Greatest.
• The origin for the name is Greek as a variant of Alexandra. Meaning: Defender.
• American meaning of the name Ally for a girl: of noble birth

Links to

"Ally McBeal", a 90s television show about a young lawyer
Ally Sheedy, a female actor (born 1962)