*Paris: Chapter One*

From Spooner, WI:
One and a half hours in the car will bring you to Duluth or Eau Claire. Christmas shopping, anyone? In two and a half hours you can get to Minneapolis. There's the airport there, so you can fly away to Sweden, or Florida, or The Netherlands. Or, you can go to America's biggest shopping mall. You can go to a water park, you can go to the Children's theatre, or to an art museum. You can go to Ikea! Four and a half hours in the car will bring you about to Houghton, Michigan, to Green Bay, or to Madison. In Houghton we can cross country ski if there's not enough snow in Wisconsin. Of course the Packers are in Green Bay, and Madison is Madison- the capital of Wisconsin, home to the Wisconsin Badgers, delicious bagels, and state street. Nine hours in the car will bring you to Kansas City, Missouri. There're Grandma and Grandpa, good Thanksgiving meals, and ideal Christmas shopping.
From Spooner, WI:
Eight hours on a plane will bring you to Iceland, then another two hours will bring you to Sweden. Three hours on a plane will bring you to New York, and then another seven hours to Switzerland, another hour to Holland. Three hours on a plane will bring you to Florida.

From Akersloot:
5 minutes by car will take you the Uitgeest train station. 30 minutes by train brings you to Amsterdam central station. Then 4 hours on a super speed train brings you right to Paris.

Just a little bit more than two months ago, I was in Spooner. In four hours I could have gone to Minneapolis and almost all the way back, to Houghton to visit Jess and Seth, to Madison, or halfway to Kansas City. But last Monday, four hours took me to Paris. There's so many times since I've been here that I feel like Dorothy from Wizard of Oz. At the part where she looks down at Toto and goes, "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." Going to Paris was definitely one of those moments, and being in Paris, it was like that the entire week.

Last Monday morning our train left from Amsterdam Central at 8:30 in the the morning, by 1:00 in the afternoon we were at our apartments right by the Louvre in Paris. Just walking in the metro station in Paris is something new. Everything is dirty and smells bad. But walking right through all the gross dirt, and right past the drugged out homeless people sleeping on benches are some of the most glamorous people that you've ever seen. The station was really close by our apartment, so we walked there from the station with our suitcases. Milja's sister Marja and her family got there right when we did, so that made nine of us. Milja, Taiana, Milja's friend Peter, Taiana's friend Esmee, me, Marja, her husband Erik, their daughter Adrienne who is twelve, and their youngest daughter Joleen who is nine. The apartments weren't ready for us yet, so we left all of our suitcases and things there and then walked to the Arc de Triumph. Which is... well, an arc of triumph. It was a pretty long walk to get there, and on the way we stopped and had crepes from a stand. I had mine with chocolate, what else? They were amazing. Once we got to the Arc de Triumphe we had to climb a lot of stairs to the top. At the top though you could see all over Paris, we saw Notre Dame, and the Eiffel Tower, and the street that had followed all the way there. We spent quite a bit of time on the top, and then took our time walking back to the hotel.

Okay, chapter one is over now, because we're eating dinner. Hopefully chapter two will be a little bit longer. We don't want more than say... five chapters in this novel!