Greetings From Paris

Jon and I are in a small internet cafe next to Notre Dame.

It's pretty nice.

We spent the day strolling around Paris, touring the Seine on one of those guided tour cruises, and visiting The Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. We also popped into a little gem of a cathedral near The Louvre. It was called the chruch of St. Germain l'Auxerrios or something like that. It was the official church of the royals when the Louvre was a palace and not a museum. There was no one inside, yet the walls were covered with some amazing paintings and the small chapels within contained beautiful sculptures. A lot of the paintings are covered in soot and barely legible. But there doesn't even to be a fund raising effort for it that I could tell. Major restoration could make this the jewel of Paris churches, next to Notre Dame of course.

Yesterday, we saw Notre Dame and Les Invalides most famous for containing the tomb of Napoleon which is ridiculously large. He is in a huge coffin made of a dark stone. Actually, he's in a tin box contained within four different boxes of varying metals, inside an enormous monument made from a purply brown and shiny stone. The building itself contains the remains of other very famous generals. I'll post about it in more detail at another time.

Within Les Invalides is also contained a large military museum with every type of weapon and armor imaginable.

Tomorrow we're driving with our hosts, my mother's cousins to my aunt's house in Champigneulles so we can attend my first cousin's wedding on Saturday. Confused?

I know I am. We are getting around quite about.

Also confusing and somewhat demanding is translating. My French is so-so, yet somehow we are getting by. But translating in your head and then speaking and then communicating to and for someone else is very hard.

Until the next time I can get to a computer - a tout a l'heure which means later 'gator.