April 9th, 1998
Andy and I took breakfast downstairs in their kitchen. Mr. Nouri, always the perfect host, suggested I make a selection from his library of music to listen to while enjoying breakfast. I requested Vivaldi's Four Seasons. It is my favorite classical piece.
As we pulled out of the driveway, Mr. Nouri was taking his empty wine bottles to his trash can. He held them up to us and he said (In French) "When the bottle is empty, life is full. When the bottle is full, my life is empty" Mr. Nouri believes that wine is to be shared with friends.
We arrived at our hotel in Paris at 3:30 that afternoon. When checking into hotels and such in Paris it is customary to produce your passport. I'm not sure why this is. The day before, while touring the castles, Andy and I had stopped in Chinon to exchange the remainder of our travelers checks. The woman at the bank did not remember to give my passport back to me after verifying the authenticity of my signature. Luckily there was a division of that same bank just a block down the street from this hotel. I was able to get my passport sent to me and it arrived the next morning.
Up until our arrival in Paris, I had not given great consideration to the way I was feeling towards Andy. I'm a slow burner and I needed to process what I was learning before coming to a conclusion about him.
It was difficult at first because he was like a stranger to me. He also seemed nervous, as was I and I felt some self-imposed pressure to continue the feelings I had for him while we interacted on the internet. It took a day or so for me to overcome those feelings. In some cases I just decided to go with it in spite of what I was or wasn't feeling.
Here, in Paris, I felt a flood of emotions towards Andy. I don't know how much of that was complicated by the fact that we were in Paris, but I know that the feelings were quite strong.
We both decided we wanted to "start Paris" in the morning so we opted to stay in the hotel and eat picnic food and listen to music.
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