Old friends in unexpected places

The last few weeks in Paris have been a lot of fun. We've been out to a few restaurants and have explored a lot the city that I didn't get to see when I was here last. Jacob and I have enjoyed meeting up with Eric and our old roommate, JP.

JP lived with us for a year working for that National Gallery of Art before returning to France. We always told him that we would come to visit him in Paris at our first opportunity. He was one of the reasons that Jacob and I came up with the idea for a grand tour around the world. We got to meet up with him and his girlfriend, Christine, and her son, Enzo, within the first week of coming to Paris. They took us to this great restaurant near the Canal St. Martin called La Verre Vole which specializes in traditional French food and features only locally produced wines from small family-run vineyards.



We got to meet JP and Christine's daughter, Camille a couple of weeks later when we trekked out to their apartment in Sevran, a suburb northeast of Paris. She was very shy at the beginning, not wanting to even look at us. But quickly warmed up after we all went for a walk and helped her push her tricycle.



We also got a really nice surprise when we found out that one of Jacob's good friends from high school was in Paris. Trust the power of the Internet. Neal updated his status on Facebook before he left Paris about his upcoming trip. When we saw it, Jacob sent an email to him and his wife, Trina. We got the name of his hotel, which turned out to be located really close to our apartment. After a couple of days of leaving messages and trying to get in touch by phone, we were finally able to meet up with Neal for a few hours after his students' curfew. Neal was accompanying a group of 13 high school students on a whirlwind trip through France and Spain. The last time Jacob and I had seen him, was around the time of our weddings. Neal and Trina got married about two weeks after we did. Neal was one of the groomsmen at our wedding and Jacob was Neal's groomsman two weeks later in Bozeman. It was nice to see another familiar face in a new city.



This past week, we hung out with Eric's two sisters who decided at the last minute to visit him in Paris. Staci stayed for 10 days and Katie was here for 5. It was nice to have them here because they definitely had a site-seeing agenda that forced us to get out of the house and see some of the more classic tourist sites of Paris. Antione, who shared Eric's last apartment in Paris, got us into the Louvre for an afternoon. It was the typical first-time-in-the-Louvre-must-see-all-
the-"big"-pieces-of-art afternoons. We didn't run exactly, but it was a very quick tour through the two levels of French sculptures in the Marly Court to Napolean's apartments, cutting through the Mesopotamian art to go by the Winged Victory of Samathrace to cut through the French and Italian paintings with a stop by the Mona Lisa and out through the rooms containing pieces from one of the palaces of Darius in ancient Iran. Talk about "museum feet" at the end.



Non-stop site-seeing proved to be too much for us. So after a few days, we would just meet up with Eric and his sisters for lunch and spend some time with them in the afternoons and over dinner. The picture below was taken on top of an abandoned railway track that had been converted into park space near the Bastille metro.