Tonight is the start of our vacation! Sasha is presenting one of her papers at an economics conference in Paris next week, and we're making a nice holiday out of it. Sunday evening we'll leave from Charlotte, NC to Paris and we'll stay for about a week in the City of Light.

We're really looking forward to it. We've been in Paris once, in 2004, when Sasha was already in the States and I took a high-speed train from Amsterdam when she came back from Cameroon.

About seven months ago I started studying French, and this will be a fun opportunity to practice my new skills.