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The night before we left Rome, we worked at making our way back home on the bus, and we were stuck at the same place as a Roman young man, who informed us that bus wouldn’t stop there.  We walked with him up to the next stop and I started a conversation about Rome with him.  I talked to him about the taxation of Caesar Augustus, who was from and lived in the city.  He knew that name.  I said there were two people in Israel in the Roman empire who had to pay that tax.  We had boarded the same bus to get home and sat together.  I told him that while this couple traveled to Bethlehem to pay Caesar’s tax, the woman was pregnant.  The Bible had prophesied, predicted — the Bible is a large percentage of prophecy — that a child would be born in Bethlehem.  I asked if he knew the couple and the baby.  He didn’t.

The child was Jesus, I said.  He knew the name, but he didn’t know the story, had never heard it.  I preached the gospel to him.  We got off the bus, and I wondered how much the gospel was being preached or had been preached in Rome.  He was receptive in a way that was better than what I get in the San Francisco Bay Area.  I was hoping the gospel was being preached in Rome, something the Apostle Paul once thought.

The next morning, June 16, Saturday, 2018, we took public transportation to Rome Fiumicino Airport, which is about an hour on the Mediterranean coast.  We had learned from our trip out of Edinburgh to give ourselves time in case something happened.  We weren’t flying to Paris anymore, our flight canceled because of the air traffic control strike.  I got a flight for the four of us to Geneva, Switzerland, and then a train from there to Paris.  When we got to our gate through all the security, I was sitting down, while my family freshened up, saving their seats.  It was packed in the small seating area and an Indian man was wheeled up in a wheel chair with our seats all that was left.  I gave up the seat.

The Indian man was born in India, but grew up in the United States, actually in Kentucky.  He had the Indian accent, but the man was the head of the statistics department at the University of Connecticut.  He was very open to talking, liked talking.  He and I were on the same page as to the culture of the United States with some agreement on world view.  He also did not mind at all hearing the gospel, which I preached to him.  He gave me his card, I left him a gospel tract, and it was a nice conversation.

The family couldn’t sit down, so I rose to go where they were, and they were talking to a couple from the UK.  They were very chatty.  They going to Geneva and staying there.  They owned a home there.  They had a lot to say about the French — did not like them — and they were really funny about it with their English accents.  They see the French as lazy and informed that this kind of striking was just a way of life.  I had never been to France, and we were going there, so perhaps this portended our time there.

We got the front row on the Geneva trip because of the hardship of the cancellation of our flight.  It was a very short flight.  We could see the Alps as we flew into the bowl that is Lake Geneva.  The UK couple continued to be helpful and told us how to get a free bus to downtown and the train station.  We made it.  To be honest, even though I would have liked to have done something else in Rome, original flight in the evening, I was happy to see another city and country.  We parked inside the little mall like area that was the Geneva train station.

My daughters roamed that little mall and my wife waited at a coffee place, and I jogged downtown Geneva, with the goal of making it to the Lake.  This was bonus time.  On the way down to the Lake, of note was one church building, Holy Trinity Church, a Swiss chocolate location, a Swiss watch place, a Swiss bank, and a Swiss army knife store.

I made it to the lake, and there stood at the corner between the Pont Du Mont Blanc Bridge and the Lake Geneva ferry building in front of the Ritz Carlton Hotel.  Right there to be seen is the Jet d’eau, the water jet, that is the emblem of the city.  On the way back, I stopped at a Swiss souvenir shop to get our refrigerator magnet.  I ran back to the train station, we ate something small, and then caught our train there.

It was a very picturesque trip between Geneva and Paris about 3 to 4 hours, looking at scenery in rural France.  We arrived in the middle of Paris at the perfect spot to catch their subway station.  The underground public transportation in Paris was very fast and more clean than anywhere else.  Sometimes it was hard to pay though.  Other European cities in my estimation were easier for that.  Catching that was easy to where we stayed in Montrouge outside of the arrondissements of Paris, but right next to public transportation, which is what really matters.  Up the stairs to ground level, right there was a roundabout in the middle of which was a monument honoring the World War 1 and 2 dead.

From our subway, we walked and stopped at a small grocery store on the way to get some food.  Along the way we did notice a very nice Maison Guerard bakery.  It was actually closed on Monday and Tuesday, and we didn’t use it until Thursday morning on our way out.  Our flat was over a restaurant with an entrance in an alley, up some very narrow stairs.  Some might call it quaint.  It was fine, but the worst place we stayed on the entire trip.  The next morning we would arise and go church in Paris at a Baptist church there.