Jury Duty Scam (verified)

We received notification of this in an email. I thought all (any?) of our readers would benefit to be in the know. Check for verification on:

FBI.com
Snopes.com
ScamBusters.org

The phone rings, you pick it up, and the caller identifies himself as an officer of the court. He says you failed to report for jury duty and that a warrant is out for your arrest. You say you never received a notice. To clear it up, the caller says he'll need some information for "verification purposes"-your birth date, social security number, maybe even a credit card number.

This is when you should hang up the phone. It's a scam.

Exploring Barcelona (Feb 4)

We slept in! Ahhh. We needed that.

We showered and ate breakfast and met the Larsen's at the cathedral at noon. Every Sunday at noon, a local band comes to the front of the cathedral and starts to play (the same song over and over) and locals drop their bags and purses, form circles, and begin to walk/hop/dance the Sardona dance. It was a very patriotic moment, but it is patriotic to Catalan not to Spain. Spain is a country composed of regions that have strong cultural and historical identities. It was very neat to see something like this, even though the dance itself was less impressive than we had hoped!

After the dance, we went with Erik to Parc Guell, a 30 acre park that includes Gaudi architecture. It was intended to be a high income gated community, but flopped, so now it is a marvelous park full of artists painting and musicians singing and playing for donations. This was a place full of life. It was easy to spend the afternoon here. Gaudi is a name you will hear again in Barcelona. His architecture looks kind of like colorful melting ice cream cones. Andrew's reaction?? "When did we enter Whoville??"

That evening the two of us visited the Picasso Museum. Picasso was from Barcelona, and this is the best collection of his art in the country. Early in his career he painted the way other people wanted him to paint... like everyone else. He was good, but we may not have heard of him if he had never found his own style. We got to see his "Guernica" and hear the story behind it. There were photos that his girlfriend at this time took of the work in progress. That is worth seeing! This museum is free the first Sunday of every month, which is when we went.

Then it was back to the Larsen's. We talked with them until midnight, when Andy turned on the Superbowl and the rest of us went to bed! We loved talking with these guys!

Our "Day" in Paris (Feb 3)

We took a night train Salzburg to Paris EST. We got the bottom bunks in a room where the heat was out of control! We tried several times to turn it down, but it was HOT and the heat was right next to our bunks. Also, these were the shortest bunks we saw on our trip, so Andrew was not in for a good nights sleep!

When we arrived in Paris we had to take the Metro from the EST station to the Lyon station, and that was our experience in the city of Paris! We waited in the station and it was very cold! There were great pastries, croissants and apple torte. Probably good we didn't spend more time there!

Our next train was a high speed, double-decker. We had seats on the top level, so we had a great view of the BEAUTIFUL terrain of southern France. This was the nicest first class we saw, and it was relatively empty so we spread out and rested. We cruised along at 300kph, so it didn't take long for us to arrive in Montpelier where we transferred to the train that would take us to Spain. This was in a first class car too, but it felt more like a commuter train! It was old, the seats were broken, and it felt like we would never get there, but eventually, we did.

There was a group of 4 Canadians in their 50's or 60's in front of us so we ended up talking with them. They sounded like they had a lot of traveling experience, but when we arrived in Spain they weren't quite sure how to get to their hostel. Andy Larsen and Erik Amundson were at the station in Barcelona waiting for us and offered to help the Canadians get to their hostel. It was a good chance for us to see a glimpse of the city at night. We went back to the Larsen's and talked for a while. It was great to be with other people and share some of what we'd seen. It was the start of processing for us. The Larsen's were so welcoming, and will continue to be great friends to us.

Back to Life!

Thank you to everyone who showed support and concern for Andrew with his lung collapse! He is doing very well now, especially since his scab fell off a few days ago! What is it with guys and scabs anyway?? He is planning to start running again this week, slowly at first. He still hopes to join me in the 2007 Chicago Marathon in October.

He is still working with the Department of World Mission until Greek starts in early July. We are thankful for that job and he continues to get to know more people in the Covenant. I just finished my first week off orientation at the hospital. My biggest challenge is getting to know people there. I trained with the day crew, now I work with the evening crew, so I have to learn names, who I can ask questions of, and how people work. All in good time.

The weather here has been wonderful! We have gone downtown and walked around and to a street festival. There is always something going on, we just have to pick what we want to go to the most!! We like our small apartment and we are trying to keep life simple. We have joined a CSA, which is Community Supported Agriculture. It is a share in a local farm, and each week we pick up a box of vegetables. If the farm does well, it's a big box, and if not then it is a small box.

As life goes on, I become more and more thankful that we traveled when we had the chance to. It has been great fun to talk through memories together and look at our photos. Everyone once and a while we talk about a story we remember and finish with "What city was that in again??" I'm going to continue to blog and continue to process all that we saw in our travels. Hope you enjoy reading it, or at least looking at the photos!