Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Paris Part Deux

The second day that Eddie and I spent together in Paris was Sunday, November 29. Eddie had been inspired a few weeks before and had started to e-mail some leaders at the English speaking Hillsong church plant in Paris. So, on Sunday we went to their church which was an interesting experience to say the least. Half of the songs were sun in French and half in English and everything that was spoken was translated either from French to English or English to French. That wasn’t really a huge deal (since we were in France and all) but the worship and the message were just not really what either of us were looking for. The people were very nice and in our conversation with one of the people before hand we shared about our recent engagement (of about 12 hours) and he shared that he also proposed to his wife at the Arc de Triomphe. I told Eddie it was cliché ;)


After church we wandered around to find some bread and meats for lunch and then hopped on the metro to go to Versailles. We didn’t have too much trouble with that (although for a brief moment I thought we had gotten on the wrong train but we asked someone and we were actually where we needed to be) and made it to Versailles by the early afternoon. We spent the rest of the day there walking around and checking out the palace. Cliff and Eddie were reunited and Eddie got to see his first palace. It was a good day. That night we decided to get real food for dinner. On our way home we were trying to find a grocery store to buy some pasta salad or something already made that we could take back to the hotel room. All we seemed to stumble across though was a grocery store where everything was deep frozen.


Even though we didn’t have a stove or microwave to cook anything with, it was raining and the store intrigued us, so we went in. We didn’t find dinner there, but we did find some ice cream bars that were very cheap and looked yummy so we thought we’d give them a try. We did manage to find a little restaurant to eat at (and only half a block from our hotel) where they have furniture and bikes on the ceiling. We decided to get the onion soup (because in France they don’t have to call it French Onion Soup) and some tomato pasta. Both items were yummy, but the soup was especially good. The amazing discovery of the evening was that the ice cream bars were incredibly delicious. There were four in the box so we each had to have two (as we had no way to preserve the remaining two) and I’m sure we could have each had at least one more.


The next day was devoted almost entirely to the Louvre. We had a bit of a late start, but we spent a good 3 or 4 hours there and managed to see most everything. Granted we did not spend a lot of time looking at things, but we did make it to just about every room. We had a lot of fun but by about 3 o’clock we were exhausted and museum-ed out. We left the Louvre and headed toward Notre Dame stopping at an English bookstore that is famous (I forget the name of it but something Shakespeare). One of Eddie’s favorite authors, Hemmingway, used to go and buy books there when he lived in Paris. It’s been around for quite some time. We then finished our day up at Notre Dame touring the interior and then staying for an evening Vespers service, which we both really enjoyed. It was a nice way to end the Paris portion of our trip.

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