Paris!!

I'm not sure if you are all ready for a blog vomit but it's about to happen. In a big way! Our European vacation was a perfect storm for an obscene amount of photos because:

   1. We haven't been on a "true" vacation since before law school

   2. This was Jen's first time in Europe and only her second international trip

   3. Jen got a new DSLR camera for Christmas and an 8 gig card

For the foregoing reasons I apologize in advance for the many pictures that are sure to follow from our trip to Paris, Venice, and Rome. In all we snapped about 1500 pictures over 2 weeks. The numbers might be slightly inflated because the guys went a little crazy when they found out that you could just hold the button down and the camera would keep taking pictures. Still, after deleting most of the duplicates and blurred pictures it seems that nearly every moment of our vacation was documented. Here we go...

The entire purpose for the vacation was Nate's involvement with the Society for Dispute Resolution at his school. He was part of the team that was selected to compete in the ICC International Mediation competition. It's basically make believe for law students, they dress up, try to negotiate a problem, and get judged on how they interact and what they accomplish in the round. Over 60 schools participated, Nate's team made it to the "sweet 16" before being eliminated by the team from India.

Here's a few pictures of his part of the trip.

 They competed in an office that was adjacent to "L'etoile". It's basically a giant round-a-bout where you drive if you have a death wish. The Arc de Triomphe stands in the center.

 

One of the many gaudy law firms that nightly cocktail parties were held. Good to know that this is what you pay for when you hire a high priced attorney. The building used to be the American embassy and it's next door to the Louvre. This law firm bought the embassy from the US (probably in foreclosure hahaha) and converted it into their main Paris office.

 Apparently Jocelyn owns an international chain of shoe stores...

Army Museum and Napoleon's Tomb

Nate's hotel

 

 Nate's teammates.

Jen flew in the day after the competition ended after abandoning her child (She still feels bad about leaving little Bryn for so long). Amy and Phil were gracious enough to watch our sweet little terror for a few days until Nate's parents came in for the long haul. Unfortunately Bryn learned how to crawl from her "older sister" Libby. No matter how hard we try now we can't get her to just stay still any more. What's even scarier is that she always wants to stand up and try to walk around. Jen was having a hard enough time keeping track of her when she was just doing the army crawl! We're sunk now for sure.

Jake and Lindsey Grandstaff decided to pop over the "channel" and visit us for the weekend. Jake's doing a study abroad program in London and Lindsey is doing a "I'll just go explore stuff while you're in school." Good news is we saw some familiar faces while in Paris; bad news is that when Jen and Lindsey combined forces we were marched mile after mile after mile (or kilometer, whatever) to see this building and that museum. Fortunately, we put an arbitrary 2 museum limit on the trip. However, after spending an entire day in the Louvre, we were done with museums. Here are the pictures, most should be self-explanatory.

Climbed 600+ stairs up the Eiffel tower. Not good after you've walked like 20 miles earlier that day.

Notre Dame (not the football kind)

Nate's future headstone, or is it bed-stone?

Valentine's in Paris. What are we going to do next year!?!

Best suprise in Paris. Sacre-Coeur. Gotta see it at night! Probably #2 on our must see list.

Worst surprise in Paris... Moulin Rouge. To be precise it was Pigalle (the red light district). Let me first say that we've seen some pretty rough areas in the world. Even the worst that Vegas had to offer was no match for Pigalle. Basically you couldn't look anywhere without seeing some part of the human anatomy, some dirty word/picture/caricature. You can't look left, right, up, or down without seeing something. We walked from the Metro to Moulin Rouge and back.

There were also some cultural disconnects.

#3 on the must see list - Notre Dame and the little Italian Gelateria next to it. One word, AMAZING.

#1 on the list. Obviously.

 Some laughs...                                        and lots of jumping...

 

and more than a few pastries.

Jardin de Luxembourg

Their shame was evident.

THE painting. Everyone had told us it was really small so we were expecting to see like an 8x10, it really wasn't that small. 

Second best picture in the Louvre

Jake and Lindsay actually, but I thought it was a cool picture.