Happy New Year to everyone, we hope that 2024 is a healthy, happy, and eventful year for all of you (the last one only for those who are like us and like their years eventful).
We started the New Year’s weekend on Saturday by marching our way all the way across Paris to a museum of carnival attractions called Musée des Arts Forains. It was weird and wonderful. They usually do tours of the attractions, but for the holidays, they open it up and have the rides working and various performances. There were old style games, merry-go-rounds, a house of mirrors and various cutouts to put your face through and take photos. It was very fun and interesting.
We started our New Year’s celebration by having lunch at an Indian restaurant called Khajuraho. The food was delicious, although we have noticed that food is France is not at our usual level of spiciness, even when we ask for it to be extra spicy.
The party continued at a wonderful jazz club called Sunset-Sunside. We saw a very interesting band fronted by Samy Thiebault. The music was a bit new age jazz for my taste (there was a wooden flute), but they were very good, and it was a great way to ring in the new year. The metro was free on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, so we rode to/from the show. We had a bit of an issue when the station near to the Arc de Triomphe was closed (an attempt to keep the fireworks crowd down? I don’t think it worked because on the way back, they police were managing how many people could stand on the platform at a time), and that was where we were supposed to change lines. Luckily, Google quickly gave us an alternate route and we happily arrived well before the show started.
Like all good revelers, we spent New Year’s Day doing nothing other than going for a short walk (4 miles or so) to Parc Monceau, which is one of our favorite parks in Paris. On Saturday, we bought a pastry not knowing what it was. It was round with phyllo dough and we had no idea what was inside. Turns out it was the French version of the king cakes that one gets in New Orleans. Suffice to say that Sue found the prize and is queen for a every day (or longer if you ask her).
On Tuesday morning, we said goodbye to our friend Seuss and headed back to Valencia.
Steven forgot about our attempt to get a bagel in Paris. We saw several bakeries and landed on one nearby that had 5.0 stars. The owner and his brother were very personable and also very proud that their bagels were fluffy, unlike New York bagels. Sigh. Not really a bagel, but a delicious sandwich on bagel-shaped bread.
The last few weeks, we have come to conclusion that our original plan of staying in Valencia for six months is not going to work. In order to make that happen we needed to accomplish three things. First, register our lease in Valencia. Second, Sue, who holds an EU passport, needed to file for residency and then finally, I would need to apply for residency. According to our lawyer, it was going to be a very easy process. Unfortunately, it was not.
The first step, which should have required us to present our lease and our passports at the Valencia town hall did not go as planned. During our first visit we presented the lease and passports only to be told that the lease was incorrect, we needed another document that stated that the owner of the property would let us live there and a copy of the contract between the leasing agent and the owner . The leasing agent corrected the lease, had the owner sign the document, informed us that the contract was confidential and that we didn’t need it anyway.
The second time we went, we were told that the lease was incorrect in a different way, and we also needed a copy of the owner’s identification documents. The leasing agent corrected the lease in a different way and provided a copy of the owner’s passport, informed us that the lease was correct and that we didn’t need the identification.
The third time we went, we were told that lease was wrong in yet another way and the copy of the passport was invalid because it did not show the encoding information on the bottom of the passport. The leasing agency corrected the lease but told us that the owner was not going to provide a new copy of his identification. Since we could not even get the first step done, we admitted defeat and decided to make a new plan.
Luckily for us, we have the patience and determination to make things work. Just like when Morocco closed its borders and Peru had a political crisis, we sat down and formulated a new plan.
As always, we break things down into chunks of time. In our planning cycle, a few things could not change. I had to be out of the Schengen zone by January 27th; our trip to Kenya begins on February 21st and ends on March 11th; assuming we returned to Europe after the trip to Kenya, I would need to leave again, no later than the 27th of April; and we have a college graduation to attend in North Carolina on May 24th. Everything else was up for grabs.
We decided that we would head back to Istanbul for three weeks at the end of January as it is outside the Schengen zone. Then we would head directly to Kenya for our safari. That takes us from today until the middle of March. From Kenya we would return to Valencia for another six weeks which leaves us without a plan at the end of April. But at least the next four months are settled away, we would deal with May later.
We quickly found a reasonably priced AirBnb in Istanbul and booked it. Then the “fun” began.
We had previously booked a round trip flight from Valencia to Nairobi, and our plan was that we would change that flight to be from Valencia to Istanbul, Istanbul to Nairobi and then Nairobi to Valencia. It seemed like a perfect solution. We would minimize our flights by just redirecting the outward bound flight from Valencia to Nairobi, to break it into two legs (Valencia to Istanbul / Istanbul to Nairobi) and move the date forward a few weeks. Seemed pretty straight forward since the airline flew the routes.
Unfortunately, we did not account for dealing with Air France/KLM. Apparently, their pricing methodology is like Valencia’s methodology for review lease requirements. They spin the random pricing wheel and then tell you that they will be able to give a new price in a few days (which they never did and then finally told us they could not reprice the ticket, but we could spend $6,000 flying from Istanbul to Paris to Nairobi). It took us (mostly Sue) many many many hours on the phone to them to finally find out that we could not change our flight in either way. The best we could do is convert the flight to one way from Nairobi to Valencia, and that would cost only about $1,000 and then we would be on our own to get from Valencia to Istanbul and from there to Nairobi. Yeah, we vetoed that idea and decided that while it would be a hassle, we would go round trip from Valencia to Istanbul and back to Valencia. We would keep our original round trip flight from Valencia to Nairobi. Sure it adds about 10 hours to the travel time on the flight to Nairobi, but such is life.
Doing It On The Road 
Here is an alternative, like your hike through kenya, you could walk to and from between istambul and valencia. Since it would take some time you could also save some money by not having another bnb. Now that is what I call a death march, or even a death april.
Unky
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