Last Sunday

Anna wearing the crown from her Christmas Cracker sitting with Grant

Our last Sunday in London was quite an affair. The relief society had their Christmas enrichment as a breakfast before church at 8 am. The food was good and it was fun to sit and chat with the sisters. Anna even enjoyed the various bread options, the brioche especially.

Me with Fiona the Relief Society President (she said I couldn't put the picture on Facebook but my blog was ok)

One kind of scary thing happened while we were all sitting around and eating. Anna was having an apple cut up and started choking on a piece that was a little big. Now, it's not unusual for her to choke a little bit while she is eating but she can usually get the food back up. This time, it wasn't coming back up and her face was getting red. As I am not very good at getting things out with my fingers (I have longish nails and worry that I will scratch her mouth) I picked her up and banged on her back immediately dislodging the apple. After, once she was ok, it occurred to me that I had just done the baby heimlich. People around me were impressed with myquick action.

Jana on the far left with three of the BYU students and a girl's mom.

At then end of church, we had a munch and mingle. A bit of background: the BYU London study abroad program has a bunch of people in it each semester. Since there are so many and they would overwhelme any one ward, they split them up among all of the London wards. We had about 5 girls that came from Hyde Park every Sunday to be in our ward. Ironically, their last Sunday was our last Sunday so the ward had a munch and mingle for all of us as a good-bye. It was fun to be able to just stand around and chat with everyone for a while after church before we left.

Anna with some of the kids in the ward who loved her. She usually liked them but was getting tired at this point.

I don't think the ward was ready for us to go, at least not for Anna to go. Several people said that while we could leave, she couldn't. We decided that we could leave her and she could be passed around the ward for care with a sign up sheet.

A group of the Young Single Adults with a woman from Russia and her daughter. Maryelle is the second from the right.

A couple of times Maryelle walked out with her. She even threatened to leave, claiming she was serious. I just laughed. Grant and Jana also told us we were not allowed to leave, any of us. It was sad to leave all of our friends from church but next time we are in London, we will know where to go for church on Sunday.

Us with Nicole, the Bishop's wife. He wasn't there that day because he was sick.

Safe and Sound

We have successfully left London and arrived in California. And since I have had a couple of days to recover, I figured I would let people know how the trip went. We flew on Friday and there is something about international flights that seem to need to involve the middle of the night. Our flight left at 6:50 from Heathrow. This doesn't sound too bad until you realize that we had to be at the airport at 5 and leave the house at 3:30 in order to get there by then. At least we had a ride from the airport from someone in our ward. We looked into taking the train but it didn't seem to go that early in the morning. But I get ahead of myself, going to the airport was not the start of the whole thing.

We had to pack first. Since we didn't have to pack up our dishes and furniture, it felt more like we were packing for a vacation. We put off the majority of it until Thursday and still made time to take one last trip into town to look at a few things (we love taking time off about 2/3 of the way through packing to do something fun, it really helps with morale and energy). As always seems to happen, we didn't have enough space for all of our stuff. Fortunately, we have great friends (Grant and Jana) who lent/gave us another suitcase.

The other problem was the crib box. When we bought Anna's crib, we kept the box so we could transport it but it's really quite large and it was not going to fit into the car we were getting a ride in, especially with all of our other luggage. So Jason left the night before to take it, by train, to the airport and leave it at a left luggage place. Grant also went with him to take one of our other big suitcases. While they were gone, Jana hung out with me and helped me and kept me company/helped me clean and finish up a few last packing things. This is when she lent/gave us the extra suitcase when it became apparent our stuff was not going to fit into what we had.

While we were working on that, Jason gave me a call. He was at the airport and it turned out that the place where we were going to take the box, was not going to be open until 6 am. This didn't seem like it was going to work out for us so after a bunch of talking and thinking of options (and reassuring Jason that I would be ok), we decided to have Jason just stay at the airport. To help me, Jana stayed and napped on our couch. These people really do deserve a medal. So with her help, we got everything packed and in the car and even had a bit of a nap.

The first leg of our journey was a short, one hour flight to Dublin (on an Irish airline) on which we all slept pretty much the whole way. After an hour and a half layover, we got on a long flight to San Francisco. We were a little concerned about our seats because we did the self-check in and didn't know if we would have a bulkhead seat (the best seat for babies in long international flights). Fortunately, not only did we have a bulkhead seat but we were the only people in that row so we had four seats to ourselves. This was a ten and a half hour flight and Anna did SO GREAT!!! She managed short, one hour naps through the flight and was happy. We also spent a fair amount of time walking up and down the aisles (I have never spent so much time up and about on a flight, it must have been so good for me) and getting to know the whole flight staff.

We landed in San Francisco after a smooth flight and after getting through immigration and getting our luggage, we had to pick up a rental car. We had arranged to rent a car and drive down to San Luis Obispo as the last leg of our journey. Since we had so much luggage, we decided to send Jason to get the car and I waited at the arrivals door with Anna. After watching closely at every car that drove by for about an hour, Jason came walking from the direction he left. I had the credit card which he seemed to need to get the car. So we wheeled ourselves to the car rental place and got the car. In spite of all of our time in countries where they drive on the left hand side of the road, Jason quickly adjusted to the right side of the road so we arrived safely at around 7 pm. With the time change, we ended up being in-transit for 23 1/2 hours.

It's my life

(Bon Jovi song). Well Jason has finished with studio for the semester (and there was much rejoicing, Yeah (Monty Python, of course)) so I once again have access to the computer as well as actually getting to see him now and then.

So last Sunday I did the lesson in Relief Society. In the ward here, on the first Sunday of the month, they have someone tell all about their life. For November, it was a woman from Scotland and she had a ton of pictures to pass around. I felt a little bad that the only picture I had was our wedding picture that we had brought with us but it seemed ok.

It was a surprisingly difficult lesson to give. Not only was there the usual what do I do with my hands but I felt like it wasn't really a spiritual lesson and was more like a travelogue. I was able to include my feelings about the gospel and ended with my testimony though so I guess there was some uplift. I even ended right on time when they wanted me to without looking at the clock (go me). Plus is seemed a little odd to do it the week before my last week there. At least I was able to give them my blog address so they can follow along.

While I was doing this, Anna was with Jason. I was a tad bit nervous because she's never done that before. Plus, somehow we have turned into the kind of family where I never leave her with other people and if Jason is around, I'm there too. This was not on purpose, it just kind of happened. So I was a bit worried. Of course she did fine. As Jason put it, she visited all the men in the class. What a social butterfly.

What's up in our lives

Just a quick note telling about the newest things about us. Jason has finally been talked into starting his own blog. I, for one, am excited to see what he decides to write about because it will most likely talk all kinds of things. You can find it at www.alayeredlook.blogspot.com. He has often commented that he is like an ogre in that he is like an onion (or parfait, it could go either way) and there are lots of different parts to him that different people see.

I have started another blog. This one is about food and I will be putting recipes of things that I discover as well as occasionally talk about various other food related things that I love. This one is called Yummy Food Dance because in my family, good food makes us dance. I have also signed up with Facebook. Yes, I finally caved into the pressure and joined the herd. Moo.

Anna is getting bigger and bigger and 'talking' more and more. She has discovered the sounds m, d, b and th. She also quite enjoys taking things out of things. I bought a big box of plastic Christmas ornaments from Ikea and she likes to pull them all out of the box. I can't wait for her to figure out putting things back in.

Last day in Paris

Finally it was time for our last day in Paris. Our train left at 5pm but after what happened when we went to Paris, we decided to try to be at the station not too long after 4. Because we didn't really know how much time we would need to do stuff, we didn't plan too much and just figured we would go with the flow. The one thing we did plan was to visit the Parc de Villette.
This is a pretty famous park amongst the architectural community. It's huge and is known for these bright red follies that are build all through it. They are all different but have similar design elements. Some are able to have little shops and cafes in them.


There was also a little bit of a playground. There was the COOLEST slide shaped like a dragon. The tongue was the slide part and it went down for a long time and turned and landed in a sand pit. I had heard that Europe has the best parks for kids and I have to believe it, they would never allow that in a park in the US.
There was also the body of the dragon that snaked through the park. It was closed off but you could climb in and on it.


Also in the park is a big science center thing. They had a huge sphere outside of it. We weren't able to get a picture of it with scale but believe me, it's HUGE. I think it was bigger than the building it was next to. We kept thinking of the movie Sphere, naturally.


As we continued to walk through the park, we found some more things to play on. Jason had to give them a try.

We don't quite get the giant bicycle tire sticking out of the ground but whatever. This was really big too. I think it was taller than me possibly Jason too.
Another folly.
After walking through the whole park, we came out on a big plaza with a cool fountain. The sun had come out and it was a beautiful day (the first time the whole trip, one downside to visiting it in December).
From there, we went to visit the Pompadou Center. This was made similar to Lloyds of London in that all of the duct work and structural elements are on the outside. This one was made first and the parts were painted bright colors. Naturally it's the French who have the colored one and the British whose is all gray. It is a modern art museum which seems fitting. We didn't go in it but spent a lot of time looking at the outside (at least Jason did, I went into a little souvenir stall).
Next to that was the funky fountain from the strange water photo shoot in the new version of the movie Sabrina. After seeing the fountain in real life, the photo shoot made a lot more sense. That was as far as we had planned and it was only lunch time (a late lunch but still). So we decided to visit the Paris Opera House.
It was amazing. The gold statues were really shiny in the sun. They have tours through some of the parts. It's still a working theatre so you can't go back stage but you can see the whole front part and into the seats where the stage is. They also have a little library and museum about the opera. There was a special exhibit about one woman's jewelry she wore on stage. There was a lot of it and she did pretty much all the leading lady parts. Unfortunately, that part was kind of dark so those pictures didn't turn out so well.

Then as you walk up the stairs from the jewelry exhibit, you see the grand staircase. And I mean Grand! Natually the pictures don't do it justice, it was totally worth the entrance fee. This is such the place to see and be seen. I was blown away.To either side of the staircase where these little balconies. What better place to show yourself off to people coming in?

Look at how cute we are!
Then we went into the actual theatre. They had a couple of boxes open so you could see in. It was all very lush which red upholstry. The orchestra pit was being set up. Another example that this is still being used.

The ceiling in the theatre was pretty cool. Although it looked a little strange after all of the formality of the rest of the place to see the loose free form work of, I'm guessing, Chegal.

Anna quite enjoyed herself on the tiled floor. I'm sure she will grow up to love opera.

After this, we still had some time. We had to go back to our hotel to pick up our bag so we decided to visit Montmartre which was near there. It was on the top of a huge, steep hill. The only way to get up there was stairs so we carried the stroller up a whole mess of them. I think there were 7 flights. We discovered as we were coming down that there was a tram that went up and down. Oh well, the walking was good for us.

This place was an abbey and it was quite impressive and looked like an old fortress. At this point, we didn't have a ton of time so we just kind of walked around it quickly. The dome was quite impressive and looked even taller from the bottom of the hill. The view from up there was amazing. Probably similar to the view from the Eiffel Tower during the day.

Then it was time to pick up our bag and go to the train. We got on it without any problems. Anna slept most of the trip which was lovely. But since we can't have a completely uneventful trip, as we were taking the tube home after getting into London, there were some serious delays. Our train would wait a while in the station before we could go or it would stop in the middle. Then when we went to change lines, there were severe delays in that line. The next train expected at the platform was in 15 minutes! We didn't want to wait that long so we went above ground and took the overground train home. It's nice to be able to have more than one option when dealing with public transportation.

We had a great trip in Paris. I was glad that I spoke a little bit of French and could talk to waiters, ask for and understand directions and that sort of thing. I couldn't understand when people tried to say too much but what I knew helped. When we were buying our metro pass the first day, there were some Americans in front of us in line. I realized how soft the British accent is and hope we can manage going back to the States. I can see why other countries say we are loud and obnoxious.

Paris Day 2

Walking along the Seine

So the next day in Paris was our only full day there. We really heavily booked it and I was worried that we wouldn't be able to get it all in (even as the day was progressing). Fortunately, we did get it all in before collapsing in a heap in our hotel room that night.

First we went to the Louvre. We took a moment before going to walk through the Tuileries Garden (behind the big Ferris wheel). It was interesting in its symmetry. While the sculptures all over aren't symmetrical, the matching pairs are very similar so as to give it a symmetrical look. When we got to the museum, we took a moment over a small snack to put together a plan of attack. This place is huge and as we only had the morning (which was quickly speeding by) we needed to make the best use of our time to make sure we didn't miss anything we wanted to see.

Fortunately, they allow photography in their museum (stupid British) so rather than tell you where we went, I'll just show you.

Unfortunately, Jason was experimenting with the settings on our camera so a lot of the pictures turned out blurry if the lighting wasn't right. Now we know not to experiment with camera settings on your first trip to Paris (or anywhere for that matter).

After spending a lot of time in the Louvre (more than we meant to) we walked along the Seine to Notre Dame Cathedral. While it wasn't as impressive as I would have hoped from the outside (I try not to say this but it was smaller than I expected), I was amazed with the inside.
It felt much larger inside and the stained glass was beautiful.
Even Anna appreciated it. Even though it was pretty full of people, I didn't get annoyed at them as I often do in crowds. We looked into taking the tour that takes you to the top of the bell towers but we didn't think we were up to over 300 stairs and decided to do it the next time to go to Paris.

At this point, it was surprisingly not too late so we kept with our plan of going up the Eiffel Tower. We had wanted to see the view in the light and maybe stay up there until it was dark but as it gets dark so dang early (like by 5:00) and it had been overcast all day, we decided to just enjoy it in the dark. Oddly enough, it was lit up blue with a cirle of white stars on it. I realized later that it was for the EU flag but I have no idea why. This was probably one of the most crowded things we did. We had to wait in line for a bit to buy our tickets and then get smashed into the elevator to go up and then it was pretty crowded at the top which isn't very big (as you might have guessed from the proportions in the pictures).

In spite of all of that, it was pretty cool. There are actually three levels where the elevator stops. After the second one, you have to get on another elevator to go to the top. The strange thing was that to the first two levels, the elevator is moving sideways almost as much as it is going up. At first, that took a bit of getting used to. Then I started getting a little bit freaked out with the height (I'm not really afraid of heights but sometimes they make me a bit nervous and after the first floor, I got over it). When we finally got to the top the view was pretty impressive. They have two levels at the top. One is enclosed and the other isn't. The enclosed one has a map of the city and points out what you are looking at. It also has the distance to different cities around the world. We didn't spend too much time on the outside level because it was dark, cold and wet but we went up and looked around.

After that, we even had time to go back to the Louvre and see it all light up. I wanted to see the top of the inverted pyramid like in the movie The DaVinci Code but we didn't see it. After looking at maps later, we think we figured out where it was. It was still pretty cool to walk around the plaza with almost no one else there. It was quite a day. Pretty much if you only have a day to spend in Paris, you should do those things. We fell into our beds exhausted that night.

Paris day 1

We got back last night from a short, three day trip to Paris. We took the train which was pretty nice. Although we learned that with international train journeys, you do need to treat it more like a plane than a train in that there is security and they have a check-in and start boarding twenty minutes before it leaves. We didn't realize this going there and we had some problems with the buses getting there such that we missed our train. So we talked to the guy behind the desk and even though it was a non-transferable ticket, he transferred it for us without a fee. Yeah! So we got in to Paris about a half an hour later than originally planned. Not too bad but then we weren't able to go to church. Bummer.

The Champs-Elysees. You can barely see the Arc de Triomphe in the middle. This is about half way of our walk.

By the time we got to the hotel, checked in and back into town, it was getting dark. We didn't really have anything planned for that afternoon other than to just walk around. We went to a park near the Louvre. There was a huge ferris wheel all lit up and a walkway with little shack shops also lit up. It looked all wintery and festive. We kept walking and the little shacks turned into big stores. There were a ton of people and the trees along the street were all decorated. We finally came to the Arche de Triomphe. Turns out we had walked down the Champs-Elysees, a long way down it. The Arche was huge but they were doing some sort of military thing in it so we couldn't walk through it, just around the back. I never did figure out what they were doing.

The cute shops.

We stayed in a cute hotel in the northern part of town in an area called Monmartre. It took a little while to get to all the sites but the hotel was near the metro and the area was cute. It was on a street with a whole bunch of fabric stores which were fun to walk past. They provided breakfast (which I believe all hotels should. I don't believe in staying somewhere that doesn't) which was surprisingly filling as it was pretty much just a croissant, yogurt, juice, and hot chocolate.

These cool spinny things a little back from the walk way. Jason had to try one.

We didn't have any problem getting used to the metro system. It's pretty much like all other systems. It's pretty old though. We were shocked when we noticed that you have to unlatch the door yourself for it to open and you can do it before the train comes to a complete stop.
The stations weren't the cleanest and there was a ton of graffiti. On the plus side, there were no topless women on the billboards. Maybe they are more of a summer thing. Another funny thing about the system is the maps. They actually show the lines superimposed on the map of the city. Most system maps just have straight lines for the routes so you don't actually know where they are in relation to what's above ground. This was nice but a little odd to see the lines take turns.

At the start of our walk before it got really dark. The buildings in the background reminded us of Philadelphia (they are what the library in downtown Philly was based on)