We thought of too many witty titles to pick just one...

**It was taking me too long to write and upload pictures so I figured I should post the first half of our trip. This is part 1. Tomorrow I'll do the rest.**

Here are the best ones:

An American in Paris
Uma Reunião de Gray e Pires -or- 8 Years Too Long
I See London, I See France...
Lost in Translation
Parlez Vous, Disney?
How to Learn Portuguese in 3 Days
Could We BE Anymore International?
A Little Slice of Heaven
What Language Barrier? -or- I Don't Have to Speak Your Language to Know What You're Saying
I Louvre You
We'll Always Have Paris
Introducing J. Reubes

Over the Easter weekend we went to Paris! One of Brent's favorite mission companions and his wife live there now so we went to see them and happened to fit a little bit of Paris sightseeing in there, too. Brent and Fernando haven't seen each other since Brent's last zone conference on his mission, eight years ago. We have kept in touch with he and his wife, Cris, via email and phone calls every few months but it was about time we all met each other in person.

We've all been very excited about this reunion for a few months now but I started to get a little nervous because I don't speak Portuguese and Cris only speaks Portuguese and French. I have Brent to translate for me and Fernando speaks English as his 3rd language so we could communicate most of the time. I was still nervous, though.

We took the Eurostar train through the Chunnel on Thursday night and met the Pires' at the Gare du Nord station in Paris. They live outside of the city so by the time we got home and got dinner ready, it was midnight. Oh well! We still ended up staying up talking until 2am.

Brent exchanged our travel money for Euros before we left the UK. It's so funny looking! We think GBP looks like play money but it's nothing compared to Euros. And they are really small. Or maybe it's US money that's the funny stuff...

On Friday, Fernando had to work so Cris, Brent and I did some sightseeing on our own. Poor Brent was stuck all day with 2 very chatty women, who happen to not speak the same language, so he was just a walking mouthpiece all day. It was pretty funny, especially at lunch. He sat in between us and just translated the whole time. Sometimes, we'd all get so into it, he would be talking to Cris and then say something to me completely forgetting he was still speaking Portuguese and stare at me waiting for a response.

We took the train into the city and saw the bibliothèque du Centre Pompidou. It is a very large "library" dedicated to George Pompidou, a past president of France. It was a huge building with a museum, restaurant and cinema inside. There were metal detectors at the entrance. The area around the outside was full of people just sitting around eating and talking watching the various street performers. I guess that is French Culture.

We also saw the Hotel deVille. Not sure of the history of it, but it was big and old and pretty and there were lots of demonstrators, for one cause or another.

We walked a lot, and saw a lot of typical French/European scenes. The river was beautiful with all kind of pretty bridges and walkways.

One stop along our way was the Notre Dame Cathedral. It's massive! Because of the holiday, the line for tours wrapped all the way around to the back so we decided to skip it this time (which became our theme for the weekend). We decided rather, to walk around and take some pictures of the outside. At University (there's some more British speak for you), my very favorite class was Art History, and my favorite section of the class was Cathedrals. It was simply amazing to actually see the building in person. I took a couple hundred pictures so narrowing it down to these was really hard. Beautiful. You could see some places where restoration had taken place but there are several places, and gargoyles that are hundreds of years old, which is why some of the scary guys look more like ferrets than monsters.

Of course we had to stop at the Eiffel Tower! Again, really long lines and it was starting to rain so we skipped the chance to go up, we'll do that next time. Brent and Cris were both really surprised at how big it is! They thought it would be smaller. Another thing we found funny/interesting were all the illegal street vendors. There were tons of them! And a few of the brave ones stood literally right outside of the gift shop trying to sell to the people coming out. Really!? They are like pigeons, if one is selling, they all flock over and try to sell more to the person who already bought something. And they scatter like birds as soon as a cop shows up. It was funny.

We met up with Fernando at Bastille, a neighborhood known for the big war memorial in the center. There are lots of shopping and food places here, and one of the Paris Opera houses.

We ate at a french restaurant called Paradis du Fruit. It was an organic, mostly vegetarian place. It was pretty good. We had to ask for a special English menu because Fernando was having a hard time translating all the food names for us.

**See you tomorrow for the rest!**