Tu es grand! at 6:48 AM

So I'm guessing you guys who read this want to know what we've been doing. Well...let me tell you :). Our apartment is really small; it's what is called a studio apartment. Basically it's one room with a bathroom. The bed is what the French call a clic-clac; we in America call this a futon. The stove is connected to the sink, and the television is the size of my hand, but no worries, we really don't have time for tv. Our apartment is located on Edgar Quinet Avenue in the 17th quarter of Paris. Now that you know where we live, let's talk about what we've been doing. Day one after finally making it to Paris, we set out to conquer the city...and believe me it's a lot to conquer. Just like we do everyday, we took the sweatbox elevator down to the ground floor, went outside and turn right. We walked about five blocks down to the metro stop we use everyday, Edgar Quinet, also the name of the road. This metro stop is part of the 6 line, each metro line has a different color/number. Anyway, we took the metro until we got to the center of Paris, I mean, we've got to see the Eiffel Tower you know. P.S. it snowed the day we got here so Paris is covered in snow!!! So after looking at the Eiffel Tower for about 2 seconds, it just doesn't do much for us, we just walked around the city and looked at everything, btw it's night when we're doing this. Eventually we got tired, we'd been up for 30 something hours, so we found a little creperie and had dinner before going back to our apartment and sleeping. If you're not familiar with them, a creperie serves crepes (small thin pancake like thing). Baker had a Nutella (hazelnut chocolate spread) and banana crepe, and Alex had a ground beef, mushroom, and egg crepe, strangely called the Crepe Obama...LOL! Forgot one step...we went grocery shopping this day too. Grocery shopping was definitely one of our most interesting experiences. If you've ever taken a language class, when you learn vegetables and food, you think, when am I ever going to use this vocabulary...IN THE GROCERY STORE. So the French don't use shopping carts, unless you want to pay a Euro, they use what I can best describe as a small basket with wheels and a telescoping handle. So, little wheely basket thingy in hand, we start shopping. We picked up the simple things: potatoes, wine, cucumbers, zucchini, oranges, etc. Then, we got a little confused. We thought, "Hey lets get bread and sandwich meat for really cheap lunches." Although finding bread in France is easy, finding sliced bread for sandwiches is a bit different. Lunch meat normally comes in packs of 25 slices or so right? Not in France, it comes in packs of two and four slices, so we bought about 5 packages. We picked up some Nutella, strawberry jam, milk...that was hard too, they have lots of different milks and they don't teach you the words for skim, whole, and 2%. We ended up getting what we thought was 2%, ended up being organic whole milk haha, sick! We picked up a few other things, then went back to the apartment and slept.

Day 2 we woke up around 7 am, decided that was too early so went back to sleep until 10. Alex cooked breakfast: scrambled eggs and toast with our amazing jam and some fresh strawberries! We made toast in the oven because we couldn't find the toaster. We went out into the city later after making plans for the night with the people at le Pavé d'Orsay. We showed up at le Pavé at around 4...turns out the service didn't start until 7, so, after watching a little puppet show of the birth of Jesus for the Parisian children, we killed three hours around the area near the Seine (Paris's big river). At 7pm we went back to le Pavé and met some wonderful people. Our favorites that we've met are Steve, from America; Francisco, from France; and Jeanne, from France. A worship service in France is a bit different from that in America. This particular one was a small group of Christians, about 20 people all gathered in a small room, usually like what would be reserved for a college or youth ministry. In France, they serve wine before you start the service, since it's Christmas the wine was hot with little oranges and spices in it. Anyway the beginning of the service, remember this is all in French, was really overwhelming. After all we've gone through with our calling to France and serving the people here for the Lord, after taking French for hours and hours, we were able to stand and worship our same God with French people. Seeing the French people, a culture so fast paced and cold and individual at some times, open their lives and hearts to a God which their world explains as nonsense and limited thinking was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. The chorus of one of the songs we sang was as I can remember, "Il est grand digne d'être exalter et louer, de tout coeur nous l'aimons l'adorons, ton nom est saint" (He is big, worthy of being exalted and praised, with all our heart we love him and adore him, your name is holy) Imagine being in the middle of Paris, with French people surrounding you, raising your voice to the God who knows no separation of his people, some people raising their hands, some dancing and moving before the Lord, all singing without hesitation to a God whom they know is love. The sermon was on part of the Beatitudes, meekness or being meek in spirit. In the French culture especially, meekness is not a common thing, one's ability to do everything of himself without borders or limitations is huge here. We then got in groups of 3 and prayed for each others lives, talked about the sermon and just hung out. We were invited to the Christmas party the next night at le Pavé, and made plans to come to that. We went back to the apartment, made chicken fettuccine alfredo and went to sleep after a LONG day.

-Lane