June 19th- Church Hopping

Maybe it's just our luck, but I have found that it is much more difficult to (a) find a Mormon church, and (b) get transportation to Church in a foreign country.

On Sunday morning, after much Google mapping, a group of us trekked to Church. We took the Metro a good part of the way, and went the rest of the way on foot. We got onto the street the church was supposed to be on and had a Harry Potter experience: the church was supposed to be building number 64. We found number 62 and 66 but no 64... We wandered up and down the street for a few minutes, and then luckily these two men walked by and pointed out number 64 for us. It was a garage door. "You Mormons?" one of the men asked. "My cousin Mormon. He goes here," he said, pointing to the metal entry. "It's closed." Closed?! Did we get the meeting time wrong or what?

Shocked and slightly embarrassed at the sight of Larry in a towel, we turned around and headed for the other church near Centre Pompidou. We found it- just as the service had ended. Just our luck. But we looked inside this cute little LDS visitors center there, and we got to talk to the sister missionaries. All in all, I still felt good for making the effort.

We decided that visiting Notre Dame was a Sunday appropriate activity, so we walked there from Centre Pompidou. We got there just as a session ended, and the next one didn't start till 4:30. But we figured, what else do we have to do today? So we decided to wait. We sat there. For two and a half hours. Two and a half looong hours. Luckily Leslie brought her scriptures, and she let me read them while we were waiting. I took a moment to enjoy the irony of my predicament- reading the Book of Mormon in a Catholic Church, as it were.

The session finally started, but as it turns out, it was an organ concert. The organist was talented, I suppose, but I don't like the organ. After waiting for two and a half hours, we left 20 minutes into the concert.

We got back to the hotel around dinner time. I Skyped my family and wished my Dad Happy Father's Day. We're pretty new to Skype so we struggled with getting it to work at first, but it all worked out.  It was so great to hear from my family!