This morning I got to have my first real European adventure. Everyone was supposed to meet in the hotel lobby at 9:30 am for our business visit. The plan was to take the subway together to the Paris Ward building to meet with our presenter. A little after our appointed time, Paul realized that my roommate, Justin, had never come down to the lobby. He sent me up to know on the door and hurry him along. I ran up the stairs and knocked twice on the door to our room. When there was no response, I figured he must have come back downstairs. Knowing we were running late, I took off down the stairs to meet the rest of the group. When I got to the bottom, everyone was gone. At first I was kind of ticked off that they took off without me. But, as the frustration slowly began to fade away, it was replaced with excitement. I thrive off of adventures in travel situations, and this was surely going to be an adventure. I walked out to the main road to see if I could see anyone from the group, but no one was there. Initially, I decided to try my best to follow the directions Paul had shared and took off walking. After walking for a block and not seeing the subway station that was supposed to be on my left, I decided I would need a little more help. So, I returned to the hotel and talked to the lady at the desk. She pointed me in the general direction and I took off working towards the Subway stop. When I got there, I could not buy my ticket because the machine would not accept 50 Euro notes and that was all I had. That meant I had to walk back out of the station and buy breakfast in order to make change for the ticket. I thought for sure I was going to miss the entire visit. Although it crossed my mind just to take off by myself, I decided to keep going on to try and catch up with the group. Thankfully, the Subway system is really similar to the ones in New York and London. With the help of the desk attendant and my own knowledge of the Subway system, I was able to easily find my way to the correct stop. Finding my way from the stop to the church building was a different story. When I exited the subway station, I honestly had no idea where to go. Thankfully, I started walking in the right direction and found the street of the church building a block down. This time, I did not turn the right way. But, Heavenly Father had my back. I ran into a companionship of missionaries who were walking down the street. It felt so nice to see a pair of friendly faces. They were headed towards the church building with a man who introduced himself as our presenter. Sigh of relief. I had not missed anything. The Paris Ward building is tucked away in a little alley and housed in a large, old Parisian style building with a courtyard in the middle. The building also doubles as home to the mission offices, which is where our presentation took place. I was the first one to arrive from the group and I was completely shocked that no one else was there. They all showed up about ten minutes later. None of them even realized I was not with them.
Our business presenter is a member of the church who works for the OECD. His responsibilities include heading up the economic development in Korea and Japan. The job sounds interesting but he used a ton of graphs and economic jargon that had me pretty confused. This visit went much better than the visit at the European Commission. As we discussed afterwards, someone brought up the fact that all of us being members of the Church automatically creates a sense of trust that was not present in the other visit. What a blessing it is to have that connection anywhere we go in the world.
After the visit, I went with a group to tour the catacombs. The line was over two hours long! I'm not sure I would wait that long again. The catacombs were cool but I don't think I was in the mood to really appreciate them. To me, they seemed like piles of bones in a never ending maze of underground tunnels. The bones lined both sides of the corridor and were stacked about shoulder high. All we could see were femurs and skulls; I'm not sure what they did with the rest of the bones. The sheer magnitude of the catacombs was impressive. The tunnels are home to six million human bones. There is a certain sense of reverence as you think about the legacy of all those humans who call the catacombs their final resting place. I'm glad I went, but I probably won't do it again.
From the catacombs we ventured off to find lunch. We rode the subway to the Champs de Elysee and ate dinner at McDonalds. Normally, I would not do this in France, but we wanted the novelty of being able to eat on the most expensive street in the world and McDonalds was the only place we could afford. The only other thing we did was walk back the the Arch de Triomph at the end of the street. By that time we had to get back to the hotel. Paul gave us an early curfew because we have been running so hard the past few days. I am really thankful for that.
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