New Country, New Friend

As I was running today I started to think about what to write next in my blog. I was staring out at the gorgeous ocean-like lake and rolling hills with the sunshine beating down and I honestly thought I would write for an hour about it. I was going to write about the half-timber medieval Tudor houses and how they have inspired me entirely to build our house just like that (I have a collection of inspiring pictures going) but with better, more modern insulation. I spent an hour reading about how to construct these houses and the cost of building a half-timber house versus building a traditional vinyl sided American home. I could write about canoeing in the sunshine and getting a tan while watching the swans swim beside. I was going to write about the cheese shop and the 100 different kinds of sheep and cow cheese in the markets. I could also write about the effects of the cheese and very little running has had on my body! ha! I had a lot of interesting things in mind to write about the beauty and about how it tops everywhere else we have been by far and why, but then tonight at dinner I changed my mind so I will have to keep the talk of beauty and dream Swiss houses to a minimum.

Switzerland certainly is the most clean and peaceful place we have been to yet. It also may be the most interesting because from the house we see a lake, and on the other side of the lake is Germany. When we are on the lake we are technically in both countries. When we drove to Basel on Friday we wove in and out of the two countries. Both are equally beautiful in the Lake Constance region. The big differences are the euro versus the Swiss franc and the more expensive prices for everything on the Swiss side. The cost of living in Switzerland is extremely high, but the minimum wage is somewhere around 16 Swiss francs an hour. That is like making $20/hr minimum wage. Thomas told us that a server in Switzerland makes a salary of somewhere between 70 and 90 thousand Swiss francs a year. Can you imagine? Every work place is required to give a minimum of 4 week vacation to all of their employees. The lifestyle here is extremely luxurious in comparison to the lifestyle we have in the US. The funny thing is, the Swiss tend to stereotype Americans as lazy (Thomas told us they could bad mouth us for a half-hour). A decent house here will cost a minimum of 500,000 francs. Looks like we won’t be coming back! We are really LOVING the scenery and spending so much time with Thomas, but we are still recovering from the tax phenomenon and we are learning very quickly that Switzerland is absolutely not the place for it. I bought a bell pepper today for 3 euro ($5). That should give you an idea.

So, considering the stress that comes with our financial state it is an extreme blessing that Thomas is housing us. I want to tell you the whole story starting from the beginning. Jared and I were looking for housing in Switzerland for the week we had planned, but we were starting to find that it was outrageous given the cost of things here. They must think everyone in the world has a minimum wage like theirs. We contacted Thomas because his house was the cheapest decent looking listing on airbnb.com. He responded, we booked it, and then the day we made the offer we noticed that he changed his prices to per person which was much too expensive for us. We could hardly afford the original price, and his change was doubling the price! We brainstormed about what we were going to do to afford Switzerland. We considered renting a car for two days (shortening our planned stay), sleeping in it, and using it to get us to the border of Italy where we would drop it off at Lugano airport and stare at the Alps for a few hours and then catch a train to Italy. That was our backup plan. Crazy, right? Well, because God is good Thomas accepted the way-too-low offer even though he had raised his prices and didn’t complain or anything. He even offered to pick us up at the airport to save us a wad of cash (public transportation here is very expensive, just like everything else). We ditched the car idea and embraced the idea of a lake-front house on the border of Germany far away from the Alps (which was a bummer for us).

Thomas has been living alone for quite some time. He was born in Switzerland, moved to NYC for over 20 years, and then just came back to Switzerland recently. He is in his late fifties and has two children living in the US. He has pancreatitis and a huge side-effect of the life-threatening disease is extreme depression which he has been battling for quite some time. We can tell that he is lonely in a lot of ways, and that having us here brightens up his life. He is on medical leave from work because of his condition (here in Switzerland they get full pay for 1.5 years) so he has lots of time on his hands. He buys all of our groceries and cooks for us at least 2 meals a day. He is an awesome cook, let me tell you. He goes to the bakery each day and buys us fresh bread and healthy, fresh veg and fruit at the farmer’s market. He cooks on the grill about every other night. Tonight we had asparagus and turkey on the grill with fresh bread and white wine. He also let us know that we do not need to pay him for our food. Food here is very expensive (I bet you could have guessed that) and it is basically like he is paying for us to come visit him. The food itself will cost more than we paid for the week here. He is also letting us stay an extra night because train tickets to Italy were cheaper on a different day, and he drives us everywhere always eager to share information on the different places that we go. We have seen so much of Switzerland and the border cities of Germany and we have not paid a cent for public transportation thanks to Thomas. What a huge blessing. We could have never afforded this place without him.

Today Thomas took us to Konstanz for shopping and souvenirs. He drove us because we had to admit to him that we could not afford the ferry (30 per person!), which was very hard for me. I learned a good lesson in pride today. He was so understanding and we just took the car instead! We had a wonderful time. I went to a kitchen store to pick out my standard kitchen accessory that I choose in each country and I chose a cutting board that is made in a town just 15 minutes away. It is beautiful with dark stained wood. On the way out I saw a set of three cutting boards for a lower price but that weren’t as pretty and then I was torn on what to get. I put away the single one and decided on buying the three instead to save money even though I wanted the other one when Thomas grabbed up all four cutting boards and placed them on the counter and told me that no matter what I had picked, had it been a 200 euro coffee grinder (which I was eying), he was planning on buying it for me. He made a joke about how it was too bad for me that I picked the cutting boards. Anyway, the point IS, we have been here for not even 5 whole days and this man is blessing us in overwhelming, hard-to accept ways. He doesn’t even know us, yet he wants to gift us over and over again. All I have to say is that I am almost in tears thinking about the financial stress that I could have and then about the goodness of God coming in and providing for us over and over again.

In just 5 days I feel as if I know Thomas well. He has shared with us about his son and daughter and how much he misses them. We talk about the split that he and his ex had and where they went wrong. We talk about our marriage and the foundation that we have built and how Jared and I both believe we can withstand anything. I think Thomas is starting to believe us as he watches us. Tonight over dinner he let us know that he would miss us when we left, which is something that we really love to hear. Sometimes we feel like people are ready to get rid of us! It is wonderful to know that we are blessing to a person rather than a burden. It turns out that Thomas probably needs us as much as we need him.

The last thing I really want to write about is something that I never thought about until tonight when we were eating dinner and staring over the lake at Germany. I was thinking about WW2 and about what that must have looked like from over here on this side of the lake. Thomas told us that his grandmother was Jewish and paid for citizenship in Switzerland right before things get terrible for the Jews. He has kind of an interesting connection to the event. We were looking over the border and talking about how the Jews would swim across the lake at night, hundreds of them, and the Swiss would find them in the morning and send them back over to die. Even though Switzerland was neutral in the event, they played a great role. Thomas said that his father has memories of when the Germany was bombed and the ashes and soot would cover the lake and float over and cover part of Switzerland – the part we are staying in now that looks so entirely beautiful. It’s hard to imagine it otherwise. Crossing into Germany and being in Konstanz there are hardly any signs of the war or of the wreckage. Most German people aren’t proud of their history at all so they have tried to restore every building and hide the traces. It is interesting to me, because it wasn’t so long ago that this all happened. I could watch an 80 year old German man and daydream about the role he may have played as a German soldier. Anyway, sitting there, looking at the border of Germany and being so close to the place where Hitler manipulated and destroyed was really interesting to me. It also made me proud of my heritage and proud that America put a firm stop to the devastation. We sat outside tonight and talked about all sorts of things from the time the sun was high in the sky until it was completely dark outside and we had to go in because we could hardly see each other.

We have spent basically all of our time here with Thomas (except for when we lock ourselves away in our cave to work and write blogs and sleep) and it has been extremely enjoyable. It seems with each city or country we make some sort of a bond. The whole experience has totally opened my eyes to the beauty people all over the world and has allowed me to think outside of my little box. I believe everywhere we go we can give to the people and also take something from them to enrich ourselves. I had personal goals for this trip. One was to gain knowledge and to become more aware of myself and more confident in who I am without trying to be anyone else. This experience has made me see that I also have something to offer. I have Jesus living within me which is appealing to anyone if I just let it show. I have a God who will take care of me in every situation. If that doesn’t make a person feel confident, I don’t know what will.

My First and Probably My Last

This blog will be quite different then most….mainly because of the person writing it. Right now my wife is sleeping beside me at half past noon. She woke up this morning with a terrible stomach ache and thinking food would help she ate but in fact it didn’t help and that is why she is taking a lil nap. So I have taken it upon myself to be a good husband and take some of the weight that my wife carries off of her back and put it on my own. So if you are ready to hear about the end of our London journey and the beginning of our Switzerland journey from an insensitive, laid back, not much of a writer, no grammar skills-man than keep on reading….if not I will not be hurt, I promise. Okay enough of the intro….i just know that I have to jabber a lot or this blog would be about 2 sentences….We were in London and it was great. Now we are in Switzerland and it is great! So I hope you wont mind my jibber jabber!!!!!

If I am not mistaken my wife last finished with our dinner with Antonia and her boyfriend Antoni. So I will begin with the next day. We woke up around 11 as usual because we love to sleep and we stay up until 3 a.m. every night….but I am sure you already knew that. We decided to head into the city and check out some of the sites of London. We took the tube (i.e. underground rail system) to Waterloo exit where we walked out to the river and took a stroll along the banks. Of course since it was Saturday and it is London the banks were very busy and full of people doing things for money….such as this picture….which is hard to describe but basically there is a girl underneath the men and the entertainer removed the crates the men were sitting on but they stayed up and did not fall….which was pretty cool. Cool enough for Ashton to beg me to give her a pound to give the entertainer….which I eventually did. After that we walked a little further and saw some break dancing which we watched for a little bit and then moved on before Ashton would want to give any more money away. We found a souvenir shop where we bought our coaster…which was very nice for me because we usually have to go into 30 different stores looking for the right coaster and we usually end up going back and buying the one we saw first….so that was a relief. We then headed to parliament and took a few pictures which was all we really could do there. There was a park nearby that we went and sat at for a little while and then decided to go into the city center and grab something to eat. Of course going out to eat is very expensive in Europe so we just shared some nachos….played some monopoly deal and then headed back to our “home,” where we stayed the rest of the night and did a whole lot of nothing really.

Moving onto Sunday. We met up with Simon and Kiren, his fiancé. Now Simon is the main reason we wanted to come to London so we were really looking forward to meeting up with him as well as meeting his fiancé. A little background on how we know him. He lived in Danville quite a while ago and went to the same church, Danville Alliance, we did. He also stayed with my family for a summer I believe so I got to know him pretty well. We were meeting them in a tube station at 2:30. So Ash and I arrived at 2:15, because I like to be early, and waited for them. We waited and waited and waited. Since we have not phone there was no way to contact them. It was now almost 3:30 so I came up with a plan of me getting back on the tube and going back to the house and skyping him to see where he was and if everything was alright. I wanted Ash to stay just in case they showed up. Which they did right about the time I got back to the house. So I then returned and we headed off to eat some dinner at Nando’s. Now this is probably my favorite restaurant in all of Europe. The reason being is the fact that they have free refills. Which was unheard of until then even at your favorite fast food…McD’s. We ate two whole chickens, two baskets of chips (fries), coleslaw, corn on the cob and mashed potatoes. Yes we were very hungry…atleast Simon and I were. We then headed off to find our last souvenir which was something for the kitchen. Of course since it is Sunday everything closed at around six and sure enough it was 5 past 6. We finally found a place that was open till 6:30 and we went in. Everything was super expensive. Ashtons favorite thing was an 85 pound sugar bowl. Which comes out to be about 150 bucks. I definitely said no way! We then settled on a different sugar bowl that cost about 12 pounds…still a lot to me for a bowl that holds sugar….unless its gold sugar! We then hit up some starbucks because we were all getting tired and we needed some dessert after our huge meal. We talked a little more and then headed our separate ways. On Monday we went to Buckingham Palace, took a few pictures, looked at it and then headed back to the apartment to take a little nap because we were doing another all nighter in the airport. You are probably thinking that nothing has gone wrong for us in quite a while, besides the taxi driver not knowing where the apartment was. Well that is to come. Our wonderful host, Antonia, drove us to the train station and dropped us off free of charge because she is great. We then, luckily or not so luckily, got a train right away. Of course about 15 minutes into the train ride it stops. About 5 minutes later a voice over the intercom says there is a trespasser on the tracks and that it will be taken care of in a little bit. 15 minutes later same voice and same story…..another 15 minutes we are offered tea or coffee and the same story. Now they have switched off the train and half of the lights. 15 minutes later the same voice and the same story. So now we have been sitting in the train for a little over 45 minutes. Finally a worker comes by and says that they are going to shut off all of the lights and that we can either switch trains or stay on the train. She also tells us that are 40 pound tickets will be reimbursed. We decide to get off. We then had to carry, or I did, Ashtons 50 pound suitcase side ways all the way to the front of the train…and then up the stairs and over to the other side of the tracks where our train would come. Got on the train and about 45 minutes later finally we were at the airport. Ashton went to the train ticket station to talk to someone about our refund. They told her to fill out this form and if they thought it was worthy of a refund they would mail us a check to the US. So basically we are most likely not going to get a refund. But everything from then on went smooth.

We arrived in Swiss Cheese on time where our new host was ready to pick us up. He drove us over to Konstanz, Germany, right down the street basically, where we went to a market and got some fruit that cost 15 euro and we ate it all for dinner that night….an expensive dinner snack. Finally at about 2 p.m. we were at his house and we were sleeping….we then woke up to a dinner he had cooked for us, some grilled chicken, fruit (of course), weird colored potatoes (grayish purple), and an onion salad which I ate not so happily though ( if you don’t know me I despise onions). We ate all of this right on the lake at about sunset. After dinner he took us on a walk to see the little town of 500 people we live in. Then we headed home and started our long night of work.

Moving on to Wednesday…..we woke up at noon and Thomas, our host, had breakfast set out for us….he is just really awesome. After breakfast/lunch he took us to the top of hill to try and see the Alps but it was a little to hazy in the distance to see them. But it was still very pretty….and I saw a deer as well as some deer stands which I enjoyed quite a bit. Although in order to hunt in Switzerland you have to be born in a family that already does….which is pretty crazy! Anyways he then took us to a grocery store were we bought our food…obviously! Notice how I am getting less and less specific…..that happens when I write to much. After that we headed back and started working again. He cooked us some spaghetti for dinner and we also had some salad and some mandarin sherbert ice cream for din din! And now we are to Thursday where Ashton is lying next to me criticizing my spelling of sherbert…..but that is alright because I know it is only due to the stomach ache….well that is all for now folks!!!!! And probably all you will hear from me!

God Makes Beautiful People

I realize it has only been a day since my last blog, but I just cannot get enough of Antonia, so I think I should write it all down before I forget it all. I also have a hunch that she will be incredibly famous someday. This blog will be completely dedicated to her.

I started my day waking up at an unacceptable hour and I tend to get embarrassed about those type of things because in my mind it is completely lazy, so I wasn’t so sure how my day would turn out. We ate our breakfast at noon on the patio looking out at the beautiful park view, and then Antonia and I were in the kitchen as I was cleaning up and she invited me to go to the market with her and then to have a dinner with her and her boyfriend tonight. Jared and I agreed to the dinner, and I agreed to the market and so it was. I can honestly say today may have topped all other days on our trip thus far.

I don’t know why, but I was so excited about the market at London Bridge that I couldn’t focus on work, so I just wandered around the flat and watched her reupholster a couple of 200 year old chairs with the same fabric that she did the walls in our bedroom with. After what seemed like forever we left the flat and took the tube to the market, which is fantastic. First stop was this awesome chocolate shop where we had rich and creamy hot chocolate, which is a favorite of mine. After the chocolate shop we went into the market for an hour or so and shopped for fresh and specific ingredients for the gourmet meal she was planning to prepare for the evening. As we walked we talked and she began to realize exactly how ignorant I am when it comes to expensive, gourmet food like truffle and French cheese. She knows just about everyone there so she would get me samples of all of these delicious and unique foods and kind of explain where they are from and what they are made of. I mentioned that I had never had Turkish Delight so she bought some for dessert this evening. She also bought about 100 pounds worth of other food for the evening. Seriously – gourmet. But, it is her passion and typical food just will not do for someone who worked for Gordon Ramsay. Yes. THE Gordon Ramsay. This woman is good. She actually quit working for him (had a few bad words to say about him… haha!) and went independent. She has her clients built up though, and she cooks for private parties. She cooks for a lot of the people in the Royal Family of England.

Anyway, after some time at the market and multiple samples of delicious cheeses and wines (and also loads of money spent), we made a final stop for some fresh bread and French cheese and headed back to the apartment. During our time out today I really got to know this woman, at least as much as you can get to know someone within a couple hours time. She talks in a completely different language. Of course, she speaks English, but she uses such large educated words that throw me for a loop. We saw an advertisement today that was grainy and photo shopped and I think it turned into a 5 minute conversation about how hideous it is. I didn’t particularly like the advertisement, but I wasn’t appalled either. She was definitely appalled and had all sorts of artistic views on the photo that a 20 year old college drop-out doesn’t quite understand. I nodded and smiled, but I did get the gist of it. She really didn’t like the advertisement even one bit. We also talked about more important things though and kind of became slightly vulnerable in our conversation. I learned her hurts and heart-breaks and she became much less ‘highly educated chef/sculptor’ and more human to me.

She offered to give me a kind of personal lesson with dinner and she taught me to make chocolate meringues with chocolate sauce and also hollandaise sauce for our fish. I watched her load French butter onto the potatoes and slow-roast them for two hours. I saw her interesting steaming techniques when steaming the asparagus and her artwork as she loaded our plates. It was quite the presentation. We had a three-course meal consisting of 1) Pollock filets with fennel and truffle served over steamed asparagus with French buttered roast potatoes and hollandaise sauce 2) chocolate meringues with dark chocolate sauce and Turkish delight 3)French cheese fondue with a sort of nutty toasted bread. We then followed that with coffee and hours of good talk and a visit to the top floor of the apartment for a panoramic view of the city.

Her boyfriend is extremely charming and he is an architect/landscape artist with a love of musicals so he could relate to both Jared and myself. His name is Antony. Antony and Antonia, kind of cute. Antony is 46 and Antonia is 37. Neither of them has been married or had any children. That seems to be the European way. It was fun telling them that we are 20, got married at 18, and plan on having children in the near future. It is always interesting to hear each person’s walk of life and the choices that they make and the reasons for them and how in turn, those choices mold us into who we are.

Anyway, for the grand finale, I had to of course ask them what they thought of the Harry Potter series when we were on the subject of books and plays and such. She was telling me about the respect that she has for J.K. Rowling and for the books. Turns out, her cousin was the little girl that read Harry Potter for the first time and loved it, and her uncle is the publisher who chose to publish J.K. Rowling. I seriously about fell off of my chair (combination of wine and shock), but I held it together and played it cool all the while taking mental notes of the details to write about it in my blog.

Jared and I could not be any luckier when it came to picking this place in London. Antonia is inspiring, and beautiful inside and out. She cooked us a fantastic gourmet meal and she is kind and caters to our every need. If her apartment is all that I see of London I will be completely satisfied for I have made a friend and I have been inspired.

Lovin' London

We left Paris yesterday evening and arrived about midnight in London. Jared wanted our last night in Paris to be romantic, but of course, we were broke so he went to a gas station and bought some cheap white wine, plastic cups, and one orange (my favorite color) candle. He packed a towel and we walked about 30 minutes out to the river to sit on the bank. There was a slight breeze, and it was a bit chilly, but we thought it would be an all together romantic night and a great way to end our stay in Paris. It turned out to be quite the opposite of romantic. We had been walking along the river to pick out a spot that was not crowded with drunks and that didn’t reek like urine. After we finally found one, we laid out the towel and sat down. Jared got out the plastic cups and I poured the wine. The candle was one of the long skinny types, so he cut a hole in one of the plastic cups and turned it upside down and then put the candle in with the cup as a type of candle holder. We tried multiple times to light our candle, but the wind kept picking up and blowing it out. About this time a man across the river pulls down his pants and pees right in front of us. Imagine, here we are: young couple, candle (unlit, but still a candle), and drinking wine (out of plastic cups, but still drinking wine)and the guy directly across the river decides to pull down his pants and face us and pee into the river that we are looking at and trying to make a romantic evening out of. Jared and I just laughed about it and then tried to get back to the romance. Jared had a good idea to empty the rest of the wine into individual cups and use the bottle as a holder so we cut the candle down so that it would fit into the opening of the bottle and then we tried to light it that way. It worked, but the wind still kept blowing it out. Jared (genius) then put the cup right-side up over the top of the candle (picture below) to block the wind, and keep the candle lit. It worked for about a minute (till the wind blew it out), but it definitely looked pretty dumb. About this time the first beggar came around asking us for money, cigarettes, anything really. Could people not see that we were on a date? A few seconds later another guy came by selling things, and then another, and another… At this point we decided to just play monopoly deal since the romance was definitely killed, but the wind was too strong and was blowing the cards away. We were going to go back to drinking our wine, but hair and bugs from the wind/dirty walkway beside the river had blown into the cups and ruined it all. It was actually really comical. If there is one thing that I learned about Paris on our last evening, it is that whoever called Paris the “city of love” must have been rich and spent all of his/her time on a yacht floating down the river at sunset or something because we saw more graffiti, smelled more urine, and touched more germs and dirt on railings than in any other city we have been to EVER. After our hilarious evening, we walked home and ate our final crepes on the way which kind of made up for the dirt and things that Paris threw in our wine. At least they offer crepes too.

We braved the metro yesterday to get to the airport. We were very successful, but my arms and legs are both aching today from the massive size of my suitcase and the unbelievable amount of stairs we went up and down yesterday. Jared did help me with my suitcase, which was really sweet because he has one of his own, but I didn’t expect him to carry it the whole way, so I had to do my part and my biceps are really suffering today. We had a really enjoyable time in the airport, actually. We enjoyed Pizza Hut (!) and M&M McFlurrys. We talked and played monopoly deal (of course) while we waited for our plane. After arriving in London we had the task of finding our apartment, which is always the most miserable part of every city. We decided to take the bus to the train station and then the train to King’s Cross. We got off there and took a taxi the rest of the way to the house. I think we did it about the cheapest way possible without getting lost, and it cost us 50 pounds just to get from the airport to our flat. London is expensive too! Who would’ve guessed? We arrived after the stress of spending so much money so quickly on pretty much nothing to find that our landlady read our booking incorrectly and thought we weren’t supposed to arrive until the next night. She was remodeling our room and there was literally no furniture in it, there was dust all over everything and no decorations. The walls didn’t even look painted. Luckily her roommate was sleeping elsewhere, so we slept in her room for the night. I was in a bit of a panic when I saw the state of our room though, if I must be honest. I thought to myself “there is no way that room will be ready tomorrow”. Turns out that our landlady is an artist, a sculptor to be exact, and she has a knack for decorating and working on deadlines. It also turns out that the room was painted. It has a kind of old look to it. She used lime (did I spell that right?) to paint the walls a whitish color, but left chips of the sage green showing from underneath. Today she reupholstered a wall with really elegant striped fabric (red and black on a beige background) and made it feel like a pillow. The bed is really comfy and the room is gorgeous. I totally underestimated her!

Let me tell you about Antonia. She is so scatter-brained but anal and obsessive all at once. She cleans everything all the time and her house is completely spotless except for the dust from the construction of the storage closets in our room. Nothing in her house really matches, but everything matches all at once. She is very eclectic and definitely fits the artist stereotype. When she answered the door her hair was a mess and she was in tights and a tunic with a confused look on her face about why we were there a day early. She was immediately friendly making us tea and talking with on the balcony for about an hour before bed. She apologized probably 15 times in the hour. When she was showing us to our room she said “If you want to have sex you can make as much noise as you'd like to.” That should give you a good idea of her personality. Of course, you have to remember that she says everything with an English accent as well. We have only been here around 24 hours, but already I feel like I kind of know her. Tonight she showed me her collection of vintage dresses and this afternoon when I was making lunch she came in and added cinnamon to my ground beef and water and salt to my rice without asking. Turns out she used to be a chef before she started sculpting and painting. If I leave a dish for a few minutes later she will always get to it before I can. I washed all of the dishes and stacked them in the dryrack and about a half hour later I went into the kitchen and she had put all of the already clean dishes into the dishwasher. That is how anal she is… I never thought I would know someone more anal than myself. That day has come. I really like Antonia.

Jared and I haven’t left the house yet except to get a few things at the pharmacy. I wish I could tell you more about the culture of London, but we don’t really know much about it. I know that they call the bathroom the “loo” which is awesome. I also really liked arriving at King’s Cross due to the great connection to the wizarding world. Antonia did get us oyster cards so we plan on doing a lot of traveling around the city this week for sure. We just had to spend today resting and catching up on work.

Now I am going to take one picture of the room (excuse Jared rudely sleeping during my photo. ha!) to give you an idea of how well it is decorated and then attach it to the blog and go to sleep! More to come on London…

The pictures don't do it justice. Can't really capture the panoramic view. Trust me, it is a nice room. :)

The City of Love and Body Odor

Oui have only been in Paris for 6 days, but it feels like much longer. The sunshine here is too appealing, so oui make our way outside every morning (or should I say afternoon) when oui wake up. Oui have developed a bad pattern here of going out during the day and then coming home to work at night and as a product of that oui don’t go to bed until about 3 AM. Oui normally wake up at noon! It is kind of counter-productive because each day oui miss so much daylight by sleeping in. Vicious cycle.

This paragraph I will spell ‘we’ correctly. :o) Although Jared and I are not city people, Paris does have its charm. The size of it is a little bit overwhelming at times and we have definitely walked more here than we walked in the entire month we were in Dublin. Maybe I am exaggerating a little, but there are multiple blisters on my feet and my legs are really sore. Public transportation here is more expensive than anywhere else we have been, so we typically save the cash and stick out the leg cramps. The benefit is not only the money saved, but also we get to see so much more because we have walked miles of Paris! We both hate the underground transport system (crowded, dangerous, dirty) so we are avoiding it until we absolutely have to take it tomorrow to get to the airport (which we are both DREADING).

Here are some things that I love about Paris:

-The weather here has been absolutely perfect. 70’s all week, not a drop of rain or a cloud in sight.

-Crepes and ice cream are on every corner. (Don’t judge. I walk miles every day) My favorite are the Nutella Crepes and the pistachio ice cream.

- The River Seine and the multiple arched bridges. Especially beautiful when we went on a night cruise.

-Johnny Depp lives here. I keep my eyes peeled. Still no luck.

- The KIND French people. Honestly. I say the stereo-type is wrong. The French were polite and kind. We didn’t have even one bad experience.

-Massive, beautiful architecture.

-Outdoor seating at every restaurant.

-Flowers are blooming everywhere!

-The Eiffel Tower, of course. Every hour on the hour when it is dark the tower bursts into tiny flashing lights. It is something marvelous.

- Did I mention the weather?

-Here I see pretty much every type of person and clothing imaginable. I like the different styles and cultures.

Here are some things that I don’t like about Paris:

-Big city, feel overwhelmed when I need to get somewhere.

-Dirty streets. All of the trash cans are overflowing, and I have smelled more B.O. here than anywhere else in my life. Granted, I also have smelled more delicious crepes here than in all of my life.

-The language barrier. I just love to communicate, so not being able to get to know these people is frustrating for me.

-EXPENSIVE. A coca cola at pretty much any restaurant is 4 euro +. Kind of outrageous. Jared still buys them. Yep.

-No direct buses to the airport for under 20 euro per person.

- McDonald’s costs us about $8.00 per person, and we are eating “cheap” at that price.

- Our tiny bedroom in a dirty apartment. The apartment is organized enough, but the man doesn’t own dish soap. The cabinets have a layer of gunk on them. I just kind of gross out about stuff like that.

-Jared getting checked out by men 24/7.

-No fresh air.

-All coffee is espresso. Can't just get a latte unless we stumble upon a Starbucks, which costs twice as much as in the US.

And each list could go on and on.

We are definitely ready to move on tomorrow, but we are both glad that we had the opportunity to see this famous city. There is tons of history, fashion, and beauty in this city, but also all of the negatives that come with living in a city. We are excited to go to London, and then to leave London and be done with big cities for a while! Although, I will miss the perfect weather here and the flashing lights of the Eiffel tower.