Oui Paris

This will be one of several posts all at once, trying to catch up from several days of busy-ness and few internet options, so read as much at a time as you can handle!

Paris was certainly an excellent pause in our traveling, and a brilliant idea in hindsight. Robert and I had two days and nights there to work out SOME of our jetlag thanks to Johnny's espressos, and to relax with family before continuing on to Athens. Robert and I enjoyed a very late dinner the first night after our 'le baggage' finally arrived at 11pm. We wandered down to Victor Hugo looking for an open cafe and enjoyed salmon pasta, escargot and a nutella crepe before crawling back to the apartment to fall into bed. I must say, after the long plane rides, airport transfers, riding across Paris and staying up all day, the horizontal position of bed-ness felt SO great, to the point of almost physically melting into the mattress. We slept like rocks, one of my favorite sayings, and woke up with lovely deep sheet wrinkles as evidence of our hard work asleep.

Seeing as we slept like rocks, we also accidently overslept since our sleep cycles were so far off - we woke up at 1pm. This was only a problem because we'd instructed Lindsay, who was flying in a day later than we had, to make her way to the downtown apartment from the airport and just shout up at the windows for us to let her in. By our calculations, she would be on the street below and shouting sometime around noon. NOON. We lept out of bed and ran to check the street below, but no Lindsay. After a while of waiting we started imagining Lindsay at the airport with no one to meet her, lost and crying or something awful. But after scrambling to leave and try to find her wandering somewhere between the city and the airport, we saw a smiling face with an enormous backpack wandering up Avenue Bugeaud. We spent the rest of the day keeping her awake with more espresso and a lovely walk to the Musee d'Orsay to gape at beautiful impressionist era paintings. Paris gave us a rare blue sky day with perfect temperatures, and the three of us soaked up the sights before returning home for a delicious meal with Johnny and Claudia ... tofu a la France.

Our time in Paris ended appropriately with a huge morning rush to repack, and prayers with Johnny before heading off to the airport again. By the end of our stay, I had mastered quite a list of French vocabulary: one, thank you, no, yes, please, goodbye, hello, ice cream cone (that's for you Hannah!) and of course, 'le baggage'.