In which Ezio is disappointed

Friday. Our second to last day in Paris. What to do? We'd been to most of the good playgrounds, and the last couple of playground trips had been a bit of a bust, with the kids all complaining that they weren't nearly as much fun as they remembered. No one wanted to go to an art museum (though there were certainly lots of those to go see). We'd toyed with going to the Égouts de Paris, but they weren't open on Fridays, so that was out. Naturally, we could just sit at home and do nothing but watch TV and play video games, but that somehow didn't sound all that appealing. Oh, and we had to be home no later than 6:30 in order to pick up the picture from the framer's shop.

Blaise, naturally, said that he had a lot to work on and that he'd prefer to just do that, which left it up to the kids and me, so I asked them what they wanted to do. Sapphire shrugged. Cherry shrugged. Ezio said that he really wanted to go and see armor, and thus it was that we ended up at the Musée de l'Armée after a bus trip that ended up being significantly longer in practice than it appeared on my iPhone app, since we ended up getting caught in a shift change. (In Paris, this results in everybody being ordered off the bus to wait for the next bus of that particular line. In theory, the replacement bus is supposed to be following directly behind the first bus, and the entire procedure takes about thirty seconds. In practice, that doesn't always happen, and so this time we were forced to wait for ten minutes at a random bus stop for the replacement. Also in theory, the 68 bus is supposed to follow the 24 bus, not be in front of it. There went another 10 minutes at the transfer.)

In any case, after the griping about the buses, we did eventually end up at the museum, where they had moved the ticket office to the front of the complex instead of the back. (These details, incidentally, are the reason that I don't have space in my brain for the important things, like which of my kids' names goes with which of my kids.) We bought tickets and started in the Arms and Armor section of the museum. Then, at Cherry's request, we headed to Napoleon's tomb. And at my request to the Église de Saint-Louis des Invalides which has never before been accessible when we've been at the museum. Then Cherry wanted to see Napoleon's horse, which is stuffed and in the modern department (which incidentally goes from 1643 to 1870). The original plan was to just walk through that section and see the horse and then get out and go to the World War I and World War II exhibit, which nobody had really shown all that much interest in, but of course the kids got distracted by the tactical reenactments of the battles and so by the time we finally left it was was only about 20 minutes before I had said we needed to think about leaving.

Naturally, at that point Ezio announced that the real reason that he had wanted to go to the museum was to see the exhibits on the World Wars and that he was very upset that we only had 20 minutes left, and so I agreed that we could leave a bit later than we'd been planning to, say 5:20, so that we would have somewhat more time in that exhibit. I told Ezio that he was in charge of pacing our trip, and that until my alarm went off, he could spend as much or as little time in any part of the exhibit as he wanted. He rushed through the entire thing (which still took us nearly the entire 40 minutes) and then burst into tears because he had felt rushed and didn't get a chance to really look at the weapons, which were, evidently, the things he most wanted to see. Also, Paris sucked and everything was stupid and boring and he wished he had just stayed home and played video games. And I always did everything that Cherry wanted. And nothing that he wanted. But of course none of that changed the fact that we really and truly needed to leave at that point or we wouldn't be in time to pick up the picture, so I hugged him until he stopped crying and then we headed for home.

In which the Parc Floral is mobbed with school kids

And, well, there isn't all that much to say here either. Except that I had forgotten that the last week of school involves lots of trips to playgrounds for Parisian children. Which means that the Parc Floral was mobbed with school kids. Who were, in general, somewhat less well behaved than the ones at the Jardin de Luxembourg, perhaps because one teacher and thirty kids is a somewhat lower level of supervision than one parent and two kids, especially in a space that large. The consensus among my kids was that it was not as cool as they remembered it being. Alas, I think Sapphire has aged out of the playground scene, and that Ezio is well on his way there.

In which we go to the Jardin du Luxembourg

Sometimes there just isn't all that much to say about a day. The Jardin du Luxembourg has a pretty cool playground, which you have to pay to get into. The kids and I spent a good chunk of time there last Wednesday. It was pretty busy, though most of the kids were fairly well behaved. And then we went home and had cookies. Pretty dull, eh?

In which there is a disaster

To begin with, you have to know that the walls of our apartment in Paris were completely covered with art: big pieces, small pieces, originals, prints, sculpture, it was probably on our walls somewhere. Also, you need to know that our apartment was quite small (though not by Paris standards) and so all three kids were sharing the bedroom on the bottom floor of the apartment, with Ezio sleeping on a trundle bed and Cherry on an air mattress. But this room was also fairly small, and also served as Blaise's office, and so every morning Ezio's bed was shoved under Sapphire's bed then Cherry's air mattress was balanced on top in a giant mattress and bedding tower. Furthermore, since the washing machine was in a relatively inaccessible location, their dirty laundry tended to end up in a pile on the table at the end of the bed. And now the scene is set: a big framed picture at one end of the bed, a pile of laundry that needed to be brought to the washer at the other end, and, in between, an air mattress balanced atop a pile of blankets and pillows.

Sapphire was given the job of collecting the laundry that had collected at the end of the bed and bringing it to me for washing, while I loaded the kitchen towels and the laundry from our bedroom upstairs. In doing so, she bumped one end of the air mattress, which shifted, knocking against the bottom edge of the huge (45 x 50 inches) picture, which turned out to have been precariously balanced on the top rail of its frame, and knocking it onto the bed. The glass shattered. Sapphire screamed. And I dropped the laundry and came rushing into the room. 

First things first. Get some shoes on. Is anyone hurt? Sweep up the glass that is on the floor, and then vacuum to get any stray pieces. Now take a look at the picture. What to do? Replace the glass, obviously, assuming that we can figure out how. Searches for "framing Paris" yield a bunch of do it yourself places, but none of them are close, and I don't exactly relish the idea of getting a massive piece of glass home on the Metro, nor do we have the tools to handle it. A search for encadrement near Place Maubert leads to professional framers in the area, one perhaps 50 meters away as the pigeon flies (there are no crows in Paris), and five times that by foot. Maybe they could help us? 

Sapphire and I set out. The shop is closed until 2:00. Back home to wait until 2:00. Then back to the shop. I explain what has happened, and that we are leaving Paris on Sunday morning. She asks if we can bring the picture. Of course. We go back to the apartment to remove any pieces of loose glass from the frame and somehow maneuver the picture down our tightly twisting apartment staircase and the quarter kilometer to the framer's workshop. She looks at it. The frame is also broken, since it was too light for the picture and the glass was too big. It was a disaster waiting to happen. She can fix it, she says, but she will need to use acrylic glass, and a wooden frame, which will be much sturdier. She does not understand how they managed to even get the picture hung in the first place without breaking the glass. She promises to email an estimate and we leave the picture there. Sapphire is full of self recrimination. I assure her that it was an honest accident and that we are not angry with her.

The estimate comes that evening, and we contact the owner through the service. Does she want us to deal with this? We don't hear anything until Wednesday afternoon. Yes. I go back to the framer's and pay the deposit. She can have the picture ready at closing time on Friday. 

Friday evening Sapphire and Cherry and I go to the framer's workshop to pick up the picture. It looks beautiful, and feels much (much, much) sturdier than before. It is also much lighter. She wraps it in bubble wrap and Sapphire and I carry the picture while Cherry carries my purse and opens the doors for us. We put it in the corner, underneath where it had been before, still in the bubble wrap. I am not going to rehang it, especially when we discover that 3 out of the 5 hooks that had been supporting it are in fact loose. 

At check out on Sunday, the rental company reminds Blaise that we have insurance on the apartment, and so we should be able to get back at least some of the cost of the framing. And finally, because she rearranged her schedule in order to deal with our emergency and need for a quick turn around, our framer was

Laurence Albessard

4 Rue Maître Albert

75005 Paris, FRANCE

who was truly wonderful and much appreciated.

In which the magic is tarnished

When we were in Paris three years ago, we all got annual passes to Parc Disneyland as our birthday present from my in-laws. As a result, we went to Disney at least monthly during our stay, and often more frequently than that. We would go on Wednesdays (a no school day in France, though that seems to be changing) in February and the park would be almost deserted so that we could walk through the lines with a 5-10 minute wait. We'd be home in time for me to cook dinner, having ridden everything (that we wanted to) in the park multiple times. Naturally, we knew the rides in the park really well after all of that, and could have conversations about what special effects were and were not working on Pirates of the Caribbean, for instance.

It makes sense then, that Disney would be very high on my kids' list of things that they wanted to do while we were in Paris, but we had to defer the trip until we were confident that Ezio's ankles could stand up to the punishment of 14 hours of walking and standing, and then we needed to wait until Blaise was back from Pisa, and then, naturally, we wanted to avoid going on the weekend because experience has taught us that the Parc is at least twice as busy on weekends as it is during the week. So it wasn't until the very last Monday that we were in Paris that we headed off to Disney, catching the A line at Chatelet (a stop to be avoided if at all possible) and riding it past our old RER stop at Val de Fontenay and all the way out to Parc Disneyland. After we cleared the long bag check line, Blaise and the kids got in line to wait for tickets while I rushed for the nearest bathroom. Maybe I shouldn't have drunk the second cup of coffee? I rejoined them before they made it all the way to the ticket window, we bought the tickets (the annual pass is clearly a much better deal) and waited to scan the tickets and go into the park.

We, naturally, headed straight back to Big Thunder Mountain, only to discover that it was broken, they didn't know when it would be fixed, and even the FastPass kiosks had been shut down, so we headed to Phantom Manor, where we observed that they seemed to be cutting costs by turning the lighting way down (read, off). Note to Disney: Spooky effects are far spookier when you can see them. We headed back to see if Big Thunder Mountain was open yet. No, but they did manage to get a train around the coaster, and we could hear the lift hill working. Blaise decided that we should wait. Forty minutes later, the coaster was opened, and everyone rushed into the queue while the Disney employees pleaded with people to "Watch out for the children." (Is this what Black Friday shopping feels like? If so, I'm very happy that I've never participated in that particular ritual.) We rode, got off, and went straight to the FastPass kiosk to get tickets and decided to use the intervening time to get lunch, and then see what else we might ride. The restaurant across from the ride? Closed. Along the path to Adventureland? Closed. But the line for Pirates of the Caribbean was only half an hour, so we decided to wait (sliding pirate—not working, splashing cannonballs—not working). Finally found a "fast food" restaurant that was open, and spent nearly an hour waiting in line for food (behind 4 other groups) only to discover that they didn't actually have half of the stuff on their menu.

By the time we'd eaten it was nearly time for our FastPasses, so back to Big Thunder Mountain. Rode. Then, Small World (which seemed to actually be working normally. The teacups. Ditto. Alice's Curious Labyrinth, where some of the special effects were working, and some were not—the queen of hearts is far less intimidating when she doesn't come out of her cage. Pinnochio, where the supposed 10 minute line took nearly 40 minutes (and where we discovered after waiting all that time that the ride that Ezio had actually meant to request was Peter Pan, which had a 70 minute wait). Then, Cherry and I went to Buzz Lightyear where the wait was lengthened substantially by the fact that 20% of the carriages were broken and Sapphire and Ezio and Blaise rode Space Mountain, where the ride no longer shoots of a puff of steam when the rocket launches, and then headed back to Pirates.

By the time we left when the park closed, Space Mountain had broken down (while Blaise and the kids were in line to ride it a second time) and Cherry and I spent forever sitting on our horses on the Carousel because there was only one person walking around and checking seatbelts instead of the previous four. We also managed two more rides on Big Thunder Mountain, and another ride on Phantom Manor and saw part of the fireworks show at the end.

Ezio's assessment of the day: "That was fun, sort of. I think it was more fun before though."

In which we visit the source of whipped cream

Famous chateaux in the Paris region are fairly common: Versailles (been there, done that, at least three times), Fontainebleau (which always makes me think of Madeleine and the Gypsies), and Chantilly, which has as its claim to fame that chantilly, or sweetened whipped cream, was invented there. (There are, of course, others, but that will do to start with.) Of course, there are all sorts of places claiming credit, and I suspect that the real inventors of the stuff will probably never be known, but at any rate the people at Chantilly made the stuff famous, and that is good enough for me.

Since we'd been to Versailles before, and we'd all been to Fontainebleau at various points, we decided that our chateau of the year would be Chantilly, which is actually not in the Île-de-France at all, but rather in Picardie (which seems like it would be a lovely name for a pet of some type) which means that you have to take a real train (instead of a metro or RER or Transilien) for an entire 19 minute ride in order to get there.

But I'm getting ahead of myself a bit. Here is how we ended up at Chantilly.

Ezio decided that he wanted to go to a castle or palace or something like that while we were in France. I think that in his ideal world, we would probably have gone someplace like this, but castles dedicated to the art of medieval warfare are somewhat rarer in Paris, and so we ended up on Saturday evening after the kids were in bed, having a discussion about where we should go the next day. Naturally, the first place that was mentioned was Versailles, but we've been there quite often, as have the kids, and the weather was supposed to be sketchy, sort of, and we didn't really want to be walking between the main house and the Petit Trianon in the pouring rain, so that was out. Then we talked about Fontainebleau, which the kids had been to with me six years ago, when they were really quite young, and decided that it sounded like too much of a hassle to get there, what with needing to take a bus to the Gare de Lyon and then buy tickets to Fontainebleau and then take a train there and then catch a bus from the Gare de Fontainebleau to the chateau. So, Chantilly it was. Of course, that required taking a metro to a train to a bus, and the train that we wanted only ran every two hours in the morning, and there was the issue of getting to mass at some point during the day. (Is this seeming overly complicated yet?)

At last we determined that if we took the 9:10 train to Chantilly we should get there around 9:30. We would be able to get breakfast there from a bakery and buy our tickets to the chateau before we went to 11 AM mass at Notre Dame de l'Assomption de Chantilly and then we could go into the proper grounds of the chateau after mass and see the house and the grounds and maybe we would also see the Musée Vivant du Cheval (Living Horse Museum) at some point. So we went to bed and dragged the kids out of bed at 8:00 and made them get dressed so that we could trek to the RER station at Notre Dame and ride to the Gare du Nord where we would buy Transilien tickets to Chantilly. Of course when we got there, we discovered that Chantilly is not on the Transilien and that we would have to go to an actual ticket counter and get things figured out, but not until after a great deal of silently cursing the ticket machines that refused to show Chantilly as a possible destination, then arrived in Chantilly to discover that hardly any of the buses were actually running, which I guess shouldn't have been a surprise on a Sunday morning, but somehow was. We did eventually find a bus that took us to the chateau, and a bakery that was open and managed to buy our tickets into the chateau and see the horses in the museum and make it to mass, more or less as planned.

After mass we headed back to the chateau grounds, and toured the chateau itself. Think art, lots of art, and ornamented ceilings and stuff like that. Then back to the bakery for sandwiches for lunch, which they made after we ordered them (much, I am sure, to the chagrin of the people waiting in line behind us). And then it started to rain. While, I might add, we were sitting outside in a courtyard eating our sandwiches. With no sign of shelter in sight. Mmm, soggy bread and ham.

So we finished our sandwiches and went back to the horse museum and learned about the history of horses and hoped that it would stop raining so that we could go out and explore the gardens. And it did stop raining. Four times. (Maybe more, there weren't a lot of windows.) Once, it even stopped raining for a whole minute. So, back into the museum we went, and learned about spurs. And bits. And the use of horses during Napoleon's campaigns. And carousels. And did I mention spurs? (By this point I would have welcomed some trebuchets or bombards almost as much as Ezio would have.)

It did, eventually, stop raining and we wandered through the English garden, only to discover (as it started raining again upon our departure) that the buses might or might not be running that afternoon and that if they were we would have a significant wait (in the rain) for them to arrive and so we ended up walking the 2 km back to the station in the rain.

In which we see monsters

Suppose, just for kicks, that you were an eighteenth century French veterinary student attending school outside of Paris. Naturally, you would be looking for fun, which would, naturally, lead you to want to go into Paris where there were interesting things happening. Equally naturally, the people running the vet school would want to keep you out of Paris, largely because of the interesting things that were happening there, and so they would attempt to provide you with entertainment options that kept you outside of Paris. And, naturally, the sorts of things that would keep you entertained would be things like this

and this

and this

and this.

All of which are housed in the Musée Fragonard at the École Nationale Veterinaire d'Alfort just outside of Paris. It is the oldest museum in the Paris region (housed in the second oldest veterinary school in the world), though it has only been open to the public for about 15 years. It is the ideal place to visit if you want to see the dried large intestine of a horse, or the bronchial tubes of a goat, or the uro-genital system of a bull.  It is also the ideal place to visit if you want to see human bodies that have been dried out and then painted so that their entire circulatory system is visible, and want to learn exactly how to go about creating such scientific models. 

And it is the place to go if you want to see monsters. Not, mind you, the Loch Ness Monster, or the Yeti, or the Kraken, but real monsters: calves with a single body and two heads, sheep with a single head but two complete bodies, calves with one head with two faces, lambs with a single body and head but eight legs and two separate spinal columns, a baby with legs fused together to make a tail, calves whose internal organs had not developed properly, and who as a result are hopelessly twisted, a pig with a single eye in the center of its bulging forehead, all preserved for the enjoyment and enlightenment of our veterinary student. 

In which we discover the palace of discovery

"You went," you say to us, "to a science museum two weeks ago. You are," you continue, "in a city that is famous for art, and you have yet to write about the art museums that you've gone to." (There's a reason for that.) "You are telling us about some other science museum? Nobody goes to Paris to see science museums!"

To which I reply by pointing out that there were no art museums on the must see lists of any of my kids and that Paris has lots of cool science-type museums, and that, while we have seen most of the big art museums (we've been in Paris a lot), we haven't  seen all of the science museums, and that exuberant children get far fewer dirty looks at science museums than they do at art museums, all of which is by way of explaining why it is that we ended up at the Palais de la Découverte, which is the second of the really big Paris science museums. And, better yet, we even managed to drag Blaise with us. On a Friday. I think that maybe he was feeling guilty about abandoning us to go to Pisa.

What was cool about the Palais:

1. It has a lot of demonstrations and classes taking place in all of the different sections of the museum: physics, biology, mathematics, etc. Alas, they were all in French, and so we didn't participate, but it was cool, nonetheless.

2. The mathematics section was very well done. We watched part of a video explaining homotopy classes using manipulatives (there were no coffee mugs or donuts involved) and discussed what the mathematicians listed around around the top of the atrium had accomplished. And we talked about the fact that Emmy Noether was not on the list (nor were any other female mathematicians).

3. There was an interesting temporary exhibition about animals and sex, which I walked through with a rather embarrassed almost 13 year old girl. 

In which we seek the past

It occurs to me that we have only three more days in Paris before we leave for Nice, and that, furthermore, I am a full week behind on my blog, which means that I probably need to write a lot of posts in the next few days, especially as I am not completely confident that we will have internet at our apartment in Nice. (Though I should be able to use my iPhone to set up a hotspot and run things that way, at least a little bit.)

On Sunday, when we were trudging to the RER station at Notre Dame-Saint Michael, enroute to the Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace, Ezio suddenly stopped in front of the Notre Dame Crypt and said, "There's an archeology museum in Paris? Do they have Roman stuff there? I want to go." And so on Thursday we found ourselves traipsing back over toward the RER station to head underground to the Crypte archéologique du Paris and check out the Roman ruins, as well as ruins of early and medieval French buildings, most of them still in their original locations under the Parvis de Notre Dame (the big open space in front of the Cathedral). The crypt is for me one of the more interesting places to visit, because, in comparison with many of the museums in Paris it is fairly new (opened in 1980) and because we have gone to it every time we have been in Paris (1999, 2007, 2010, 2013) and every time we go the museum has been improved in some significant way. The first time we went, there were just ruins to look at with brief descriptions. In 2007 they had added artists' interpretations of how some of the buildings had looked when they were in use. By 2010 there was something about the history of Paris, and the way in which the population had moved from the left bank, to the Île-de-la-Cité, to the right bank, before eventually spreading over all of what is currently Paris. And this time, best of all, they had added this, a 3D exploration of the Roman baths and another of Notre Dame (and the website has many more:  the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Bastille, etc.). I highly (highly, highly) recommend that you check out the page, and scroll down to see all of the cool stuff on it (you'll want to be on a fast web connection to do so, since it's pretty graphics intensive).

On the way home afterward, we walked through the park behind Notre Dame and over to the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, which commemorates the 200,000 men, women, and children who were deported from France and died in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. It was a moving and somewhat eerie experience, and even the kids came up feeling somewhat subdued. That lasted, naturally, for at least 5 seconds, but at least we managed to get away from the entrance to the memorial before the questions started flying.

Best of all though, Blaise flew back from Pisa, and then went straight to a talk, without even stopping by the apartment to see us. But, he texted us once the talk was over, and we met at L'As du Fallafel, which is about a 20 minute walk from our apartment, for dinner.

In which we search for a hidden river

Everyone knows that there is a river flowing through Paris, the Seine, which divides the city into two halves, the left bank to the south of the river, and the right bank to the north. There is another river that flows through Paris, though, hidden beneath buildings and slabs of concrete on its way to the banks of the Seine. The river Bièvre still flows freely at its source in Yvelines, some 20 miles from where it flows into the Seine, but the river has been covered along its entire length inside the city of Paris since the beginning of the 20th century, when the last stretch of the river was covered up. It had been a useful river, especially within the city, lined with tanneries and dyers, shoemakers and laundries, providing power to run mills and the spinning wheels and looms of the famous Gobelins (and another), diverted from its original channel, which flowed into the Seine near what is now the Gare d'Austerlitz, in the 12th century to power the Abbey de Saint-Victor, so that it entered the Seine near the end of what is now the Rue de Bièvre. Alas, all of this choked the little river, turning the River Bièvre into little more than conveyer of sewage to the Seine, until Baron Haussmann, in his redesign of the city of Paris, began the process of covering the river, consigning it to run underground through the city. Now it no longer empties into the Seine, but into the sewers of Paris, where the water can be treated before it is released. Recently, the possibility of restoring the river along some of the stretches where it runs through the city were explored, but the estimated cost proved prohibitive, and so the city contented itself with marking in various places and and various ways the course(s) that the river had followed during its travel through the city.

And so the river has passed even from the memories of most people in Paris, because only the very oldest Parisians would have been born at the time when the last of the stretches of river were covered up. Recently though, there has been a move to commemorate the river through the use of parks and fountains and brass plaques on buildings and set into the pavement, and a stretch has been added to one of the Île-de-France hikes which follows the course of the River Bièvre through Paris.

At this point you are probably thinking that this is all very interesting, but that it doesn't really seem to have much relevance to our lives. But, you see, the street that we are living on here in Paris is called the Rue de Bièvre, or street of Bièvre, and several days ago Cherry found a brass plaque set into a wall at the end of the street (on the side of a restaurant called Tournebièvre, or roughly, turn of the Bièvre) which referred to the River Bièvre, and so our interest was piqued.

I spent the next several evenings trying to figure out where exactly the river had gone, which turned out to be surprisingly difficult. It was easy to find that it had gone past the Gobelins, and that it had run into the Seine at the foot of our street, but as to what it did in between, or on the other side of the Gobelins, well, that was a bit more opaque. The website of an annual art show called Lezarts de la Bièvre provided some information, and the discovery the route had been added to an official French hike was exciting until I discovered that the route was available only though purchasing a book, and not yet online. Finally I came across a Google maps document that traced out the route of the river, including both the original channel, and the Canal des Victorins, which had passed almost under our building, and another showing where at least some of the larger plaques were located, and so on Wednesday, since the weather promised to be mostly dry in the middle of the day, we set out in search of the river.

We started at the Seine at the end of the street, hoping for some evidence of where the river (or to be entirely accurate, the canal) had entered the Seine, but we were unsuccessful. No matter, we would forge ahead, accompanied by our map of the river, to trace it further. Up the Rue des Bernadins we went, scouting the pavement and walls for signs of the river. We found none. We followed Rue Jussieu (which was supposed to be more or less directly above the canal) to the Jardin des Plantes. Nothing. At this point we had covered nearly a mile and a half, and had seen no sign of the river, other than the plaque at the end of our street. Cherry was ready to give up. Sapphire was ready to give up. Ezio thought we should try going a little bit further, and so we walked the rest of the way through the park, and out, following what was more or less the path of the river. And then, walking along Rue Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, I heard a shriek. Cherry had found the first of what would turn out to be many pavement markings on the rest of the route. By the time we decided that we had had enough, somewhere around Glacière we had found 40 round river markers

 and 4 of the 7 square plaques which commemorated special points along the river, not to mention horrified the Parisians who witnessed my children tearing along the street in their attempts to be the first to find the next marker. There is a 5th plaque at Quai d'Austerlitz, which we missed because we were starting along the Canal des Victorins, and the others, I think were further along our path. Cherry wants to go back and follow the rest of the river, but I think that will have to wait for the next time that we spend a month in Paris.

In which we dream of flying

Paris, as everyone knows, is served by the Aeroport Charles de Gaulle, a massive airport over to the northeast of the city, and also by Orly, which is in the south of the city. But both of these airports are relatively new, and it you have read French fiction of the appropriate era, you have perhaps noticed that the airport that is referred to is not either of these, but rather Le Bourget. Le Bourget is no longer used for commercial flights, but has, instead, been converted into a museum, the Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace, which is, alas, located well outside the limits of the city, a train and bus ride away from our apartment. But, since Blaise was in Pisa, and since Ezio and Cherry had fond memories of our trip there three years ago, and since Sapphire had never been (she was at camp the last time we were there), we decided to head up to the "Airplane Museum," as Cherry called it, for the day.

One of the things that has amazed me on both of our treks to the museum is how empty it is. Not, mind you, empty of things that fly, of which there are many, from hot air balloons (used during the Siege of Paris in 1871) and dirigibles (admittedly scale models) and early gliders, including those of Otto Lilienthal, to Concordes (plural) and rockets and fighter jets and helicopters; but empty of people. The museum is enormous, hangers and hangers of airplanes of all eras, and yet strangely quiet, with few people wandering through its massive rooms, despite the fact that the museum is free, unless of course you want to actually go into some of the airplanes, or see a planetarium show or something like that.

We, of course, sprang for the airplane ticket, and so we started our exploration by going onto a massive Boeing 747 and heading up to the lounge area at the top of the plane. ("Wouldn't that have been a dangerous place to ride?" wondered Cherry, "There aren't any seat belts up here." Well, yes, it would have been somewhat more dangerous, but I doubt that anyone was allowed up there for takeoff and landing, given the lack of seat belts.) Then down, through the middle part of the plane, where the kids got to test out the airplane seats, and noted that the little cup holders that folded off the back of the tray tables were very convenient. Past where we could see the different layers of an airplane seat. Down the stairs (which are not, I think, a part of active 747s) and into the cargo bay where we saw suitcases and pet carriers and a car, because really the only way to appreciate the size of these things is by seeing a car trussed up for transport in the cargo hold.

We climbed aboard a Dakota and pretended we were going to parachute out. We walked through two Concordes, placed end to end, and noticed how very cramped they seemed to be. We explored a hall of helicopters and autogyros. We learned about the French nuclear weapon program. We saw the airplanes of WWI ace pilots and marveled that anyone would have been willing to go up in them. We did not, alas, get to see the Olympic gliders (yes, gliding was an exhibition sport in 1936) from the era between the world wars because the room was closed for renovation. I'm not sure that Sapphire believes that such a sport actually existed, but no matter.

Eventually, we realized that if we were going to make it back to Paris for 6:30 mass, we should probably move on, and so we headed out of the museum. As we were crossing the street to the bus stop, we heard a roar, which got louder and louder and louder until an airplane shot straight up from behind the museum and raced into the the sky, and so we stood there and watched the pilot practicing for the Paris Air Show, which is being held this week, until it became clear that if we didn't leave then we would definitely be late for mass, and so we hurried to catch the bus and headed back to Paris.

In which there isn't much to say

I confess that there are a few missing posts here, posts about days where we did things of significance, activities where there is backstory and history and other interesting stuff to talk about. But there have also been days where it seems that short of an extremely detailed (and deadly dull) explanation of our activities (and then I swung my left leg forward and put my foot down, and then I picked up my right foot and swung it forward and put it down, etc) the activities of the day hardly deserve an entire blog post. But then I feel guilty about not writing a blog post, not to mention guilty about the fact that I'm almost a week behind. And so (said the Cat in the Hat, so, so, so), what follows is a summary of the highlights of the last week or so.

Saturday, June 15

We are in Paris, yet again, because of the philosophy of mathematics. Now, this is not the reason that everyone goes to Paris. This is not even the reason that most people go to Paris. In fact, I dare say that the people who go to Paris each year because of the philosophy of mathematics could probably fit quite comfortably on a Metro train. Nevertheless, this is why we are here, and so on Saturday we met up with a gaggle of other philosophers of mathematics and their families for a picnic at Parc Buttes-Chaumont and, well, it was very nice, but there isn't really anything very exciting to post about it. There was food, and a hill that the kids rolled down, and a baby who entertained my kids.

Sunday, June 16

This day gets its own post.

Monday, June 17

Would you believe that we

• walked to the Monoprix for food (and toilet paper)
• ate lunch in the gardens of the Hôtel de Cluny
• walked to an Orange to pay for two more weeks of mobile internet
• spent 20 minutes walking through the Église Saint-Séverin
• and then went home

all in the course of about 2 hours? Other than that, there was a lot of video gaming. Oh, and sweeping of floors and washing of dishes and folding of laundry. 

Tuesday, June 18

Ah yes, this was the day that we went swimsuit shopping (and shoe shopping for the younger two) at the Decathlon. I shan't bore you with the details. I will observe that I realized, as Sapphire tried on approximately 1.7 billion suits, that I will be dealing with having an adolescent daughter for the next 12 years straight. I am not at all sure that I am ready for this. We did, however, end up with four swimsuits, one for each person, and three pairs of shoes, two for Cherry and one for Ezio.

Wednesday, June 19

Another day that gets its own post. . ..

In which we should have called ahead

Today was a two part day. In the morning, Sapphire and I went shopping. 

After lunch, we stuck a couple of packages of Speculoos cookies in my new purse, along with a water bottle, and headed off for the Jardin du Luxembourg, where we intended to spend the balance of the afternoon playing at the massive playground at the park. At around a mile walk, the playground is close enough to our apartment to make paying for the train or bus seem a bit silly, but far enough away to represent somewhat of a commitment when traveling there on foot. And so, when we arrived at the playground and discovered the entire thing wrapped in yellow caution tape and crawling with men tightening bolts, trimming tree branches, painting equipment, etc. and a sign announcing that the play area would be closed on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday of that week (Wednesday is a no school day, so the playground was open that day), well, there was nothing to do for it but to break open and polish off the package of cookies before we regrouped and figured out what else we might do. 

We considered a trip to the Parc Floral, but by the time we took the bus there it would have been past 4:00, and as the Parc Floral was closed and locked at 5:00, that hardly seemed worth the time. Some research (the French SIM card and internet plan again prove invaluable)  revealed that the Jardin des Tuileries was supposed to have a good playground, and so we headed off in that direction. Alas, we had not gone very far before Ezio started to complain that his ankles and calves, and so, while the kids sat in the window of a store front, I once again pulled up the map of the area and looked for somewhere to go. We were close to Sèvres-Babylone, and there was, if I remembered correctly, a decent playground in the little park right there at the metro stop. We could go to the park, the kids could play for a while, and then we could hop the train right there and take it the few stops back home. 

Away to Sèvres-Babylone we went, the kids' spirits lifted by the prospect of a decent playground as a reward for all of the trudging that we had done. The entrance to the park was much as I had remembered it, other than the fact that it appeared that all of the lawns were now open to traffic, and the playground was just around the corner. And the playground was wonderful, as long as all of your kids were under the age of seven, which is exactly what my kids were the last time we were at that park. We chalked it up as a failed excursion, bought metro tickets, and headed for home.

In which Rebekah goes shopping

On the list of activities that I try to avoid whenever possible, one can find such things as

• cleaning toilets,
• submitting to blood draws, and
• walking down open staircases

but I would rather do almost any of these things than go shopping. Actually, that statement is too strong—I'll happily go shopping for food or toilet paper or pens or anything else of that ilk, since it doesn't generally seem like much of a commitment—it's the other sort of thing—clothing, stoves, houses—that invariable causes great stress. But I definitely didn't want to repeat the money belt stunt and I didn't want to keep borrowing Sapphire's purse, which is very cute for a twelve year old, but perhaps a bit off for a 39 year old with grey hair, nor did I want to be condemned to wearing the same pair of grey slacks for our two months in Europe. Besides, the purse that I had left in Illinois was rather the worse for wear, and I would certainly need to be replacing it soon in any case, and thus it was that on Friday morning I set out with Sapphire for the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés to search for what I hoped would be a purse that would make it unnecessary to repeat the expedition for many years. 

We agreed that we would start by looking at purses in at least a half dozen shops before making any decisions, in order to ensure that we ended up with something that I really liked. So we walked down the Boulevard Saint Germain, looking for shops with purses in them. We decided that we could probably eliminate from consideration any shop that sold primarily clothing, since the purses that they had on display seemed to be primarily designed to match the clothing they sold, and I was fairly certain that I wasn't going to want to be carrying a pale coral purse in five years. We eliminated any store where the purses in the windows looked like they might be made of high class plastic. And we eliminated the shop called "TeenMode" on the grounds that I haven't been a teen for a number of years. That left us with surprisingly few shops to try, but try them we did. 

There was only one shop where I found that I really liked the purses, and there we had a bit of a problem, because I suddenly realized that I hadn't really talked about cost with Blaise, and I was thinking about dropping a not insubstantial amount of credit card. (No, we're not talking about four figures here, or even the high three figures, but enough so that I could have bought a year's worth of Nutella, even at the rate that my kids go through it.) Fortunately, both of us sprang for French SIM cards for our iPhones when we got here (the perks of having an unlocked Verizon phone) and so I texted him and asked what he thought my budget should be. 

"Dunno." Well, that wasn't very helpful, so I persisted. 

"Whatever you feel comfortable with." Given how much I hate shopping, and how much my budgetary instincts are still tied to assistant professor of philosophy salaries at Kansas State, that would be about 10€, and I might feel guilty about that, given that I have a functional, if rather crappy looking, purse sitting on the counter at home. I mean, I could just color the parts where the fake leather has peeled away from its fabric backing with black sharpie, and use it for another couple of years. I point out that I could easily be talking about 300€ or more. More texts come in.

"I spent $200+ on my shoes." That's better, since it gives me some sort of pricing idea.

"If you get one that's well made and that you like, you'll use it every day for probably ten years. Maybe more." He has a point.

"The purse you got with my mom when you were pregnant with Sapphire was $80, and it was tiny and it still lasted you better than a decade." I had forgotten about that. 

I was feeling somewhat better about buying a purse now, and so we headed back into the store and began to look more closely at the purses. There was one that I really liked the style of, but it was burnt orange, and another that Sapphire really liked, but I thought that white with gold embellishments might not be good in the winter. And then we saw, over on the other side of the store, the purse that I had liked, but in black rather than burnt orange. We headed over and I picked it up. The leather was butter soft; the purse was simple. I liked it. I took it over to the window to see it better. I liked it better. I looked at the price tag. It was better than I had feared it might be. And so I took a deep breath, and bought it, which means that I am now the proud owner of an Italian leather handbag, which, I might add, has proved large enough to carry a picnic for four to the museum, at least if everyone carries his or her own water bottle!

In which we visit kings

On Thursday we set off for the Basilique Cathédrale de Saint Denis by train, leaving Blaise at home to go to a talk and then out to dinner with a bunch of philosophers of mathematics, who I'm sure were fascinating.

The Basilica is interesting for three main reasons

1. According to the hagiography of the Catholic Church, Saint Denis, a third century missionary bishop from Rome, was having a great deal of success converting the local Lutetian to Catholicism, and so the local (pagan) priests decided that he needed to be eliminated. They chopped off his head, according to legend, somewhere in the neighborhood of Montmartre, and he picked up his head and carried it the six miles or so to what is now Saint Denis, where he died at the site of what is now the Basilica. (Evidently, there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 cephalophores in Church history, most of them French, which may explain the French obsession with the guillotine.)
2. The Basilica of Saint Denis is the first of the Gothic Cathedrals, which makes it an architecturally significant building, regardless of your opinion of head-carrying saints.
3. Nearly every king since Clovis I has been entombed in the Basilica, which makes it a culturally significant building. (To be completely fair, not all of the kings were laid there initially. Clovis, for example, was originally buried in the Abbey of Sainte Genevieve, and his remains were only moved to the Basilica in the 18th century.)

We arrived at the Basilica around 2:30, and paid for our tickets (8€ for me, 0€ for the kids—I love that under 18's are free at French national museums. In fact, if you are an EU resident, under 26's are free) and walked to the entrance to the Necropolis, and discovered that it was locked. Back to check the signs to see if there was an explanation. Evidently a service was in progress from 2:00 until 3:00, and since the Necropolis is in the transepts and side aisles and ambulatory of the Basilica (there's an explanation of the parts of a Gothic church here in case you've decided that there are better uses for your finite brain space), it would have been potentially disruptive for us to be wandering though during a mass. So we went into the crypt, which was open, and learned about the story of Saint Denis and saw his sarcophagus as well as the crystal vase containing the heart of Louis XVII. We watched a video about the history of the Basilica (with cool simultaneous audio in seven languages). And finally they unlocked the doors to the Necropolis, and we followed everyone else inside. 

In which I am unable to come up with a clever title for my post

Fans of Gene Stratton Porter may recognize the form that the titles of the posts on this blog take. For those who do not, the titles are a nod to the book A Girl of the Limberlost which I was happy to discover my Grandma also read. Sometimes, alas, there is no easy title of the proper form, as was the case for our excursion on Wednesday.

Blaise is currently very busy

• preparing for a week long trip to Pisa to give a talk at a conference, and
• attending bi- (or tri-)weekly talks for a monthlong workshop here in Paris

which means that, for the most part, the kids and I are more or less on our own during the day, and so, on Wednesday we headed for Parc Georges Brassens, also known as "the park with the stream" and "that park with the rock climbing-wall." Now, this particular park is one that we have been to many times, especially when Cherry was a baby, and which we very much loved. At that time, we lived at Place de Clichy, just east of the Butte Montmartre, and to get to the park required a short ride on the 2 line, followed by a rather ghastly transfer at Pigalle, a long (almost one end to the other) ride on the 12 line, and then a mile walk to the entrance to the park. 

This morning, I used the lovely RATP app on my phone to find the best route to the park, and discovered that it recommended that I take the bus, from a stop virtually outside my apartment door to a stop only a stone's throw from the entrance to the park, with only a single transfer (which we went the wrong way to find, but no matter). As we were waiting for the second bus, the one that would drop us off mere feet from the entrance to the park, I happened to look at the route map, which is posted at every bus stop, and noticed that the bus line stopped at Place de Clichy, which meant that we could have simply stepped onto the bus outside our apartment and stepped off it at our destination, skipping the long trek with kids and baby and backpack full of food.

In any case, we found our way to the park successfully, and headed toward the back of the park, past the grapevines (Georges Brassens has one of the two working vineyards in the city of Paris) and the bee hives enroute to the spot where the rose bushes bloomed in a bend of the stream. We got there, sat down, pulled out our lunch fixings, and were immediately inundated with large numbers of French schoolchildren, who on this occasion, stood respectfully while their teacher spent five minutes indicating the various parts of the flower to them, and then headed off. 

After lunch, the kids played in and around the stream, searching for its source (a waterfall coming out of a concrete block), jumping back and forth across the concrete banks, and climbing around and under the rose bushes growing along the banks, while I sat on my rear end and watched them. (Have I mentioned that it is a completely artificial stream?) When they got bored of that, we proceeded to make a circuit of the park, stopping first to climb on the rocky climbing slope and then stopping, in turn, at each of the half dozen or so play areas that ring the park. We walked around the outside edges of the park, and stopped to watch over the back wall of the park and crews worked to repair an old rail line that ran along the back of the park. We explored the gardens, turning sideways to edge between bushes of flowers and stopping to sniff the lavender along the way. And then we headed home on the bus, grateful that we didn't have to walk the mile to the train station.

In which Rebekah's nose imitates a faucet

That's quite enough description. What I wouldn't give for some Puffs Plus with lotion.

In which we walk in the steps of gladiators

One of the things that we've really struggled with this trip is how to balance activity for Ezio with the fact that he spent a huge chunk of the spring either on crutches or in a wheelchair, and, as a result, is wearing out a lot sooner than he might be otherwise. If we overdo things for him, then the next day becomes one in which he stays in the apartment and off his feet for the most part until the pain level is back down to a zero. Most days we manage to stay within his limits, but his ankles started to flare about five minutes before we left the Cité des Sciences on Sunday, and by the time we got back to the apartment that evening it was clear that Monday was going to have to be a rest day for him. And so it was, and without Ezio the rest of us didn't do anything particularly interesting either.

On Tuesday, we woke up and Ezio said that his ankle pain was essentially gone, and so that morning we ventured to the little playground up the street a couple of blocks with Ezio on crutches, and Sapphire and I walked laps of the square while Cherry and Ezio played on the play equipment. That experiment went fairly well (other than complaints about the babyishness of the playground), and so after lunch we decided to try roaming a bit further from home.

Bus tickets tucked safely into my money belt (in case Ezio ended up being unable to walk home), we headed off for the 10 minute walk to the Arènes de Lutèce. The kids took a very careful 7 second look at the arena, and asked if there was a playground around, so we headed around the outside of the arena to the playground in the park that is alongside the playground. I settled in on a park bench with Sapphire, who is, alas, "Too big to play on the playground equipment," and Cherry and Ezio headed for the fire pole. Thirty seconds later the playground was inundated with a swarm of third graders and Cherry and Ezio retreated to the bench where we were sitting and just watched, complaining that the other kids had taken over the playground. That quickly turned into complaints that the kids weren't leaving to go somewhere else. At one point, they decided to try braving the playground anyway. Cherry was promptly bowled over by an unobservant kid (who was roundly scolded by his teacher), and returned, sobbing, to the bench.

Once she had stopped crying, we decided to go explore the arena, which was, after all, what we had really come to do anyway. And so we walked through the arena, hunting out all of the hidden staircases and back entrances that we could find (and, naturally, going through them), stopping to watch old Frenchmen playing a game of pétanque. (The kids now want to bring a pétanque set home with us. I may wish I had another suitcase.) By the time that we had explored things thoroughly the class had, at long last, left the playground, and so Cherry and Ezio had the run of the playground for awhile before we headed back to the apartment.

In which we are scientists

The whining of the last post notwithstanding, we actually had a pretty good time on Sunday, when we headed to the Cité des Sciences for the day. We got off to a rather inauspicious start to the day when we discovered, halfway through our transit to the museum, that the relevant metro line had been closed for the weekend so that they could make much needed repairs to the train tracks. Of course, one of the little quirks of the tickets used by RATP is that you can either

1. use them for as many train sections as you want, so long as you don't actually leave the subway system, or
2. use them for 90 minutes anywhere on the bus/tram system.

What you cannot do is use a single ticket to move between the train system and the bus system or tram. What this meant, practically speaking, was that once we had committed to taking the train to the museum, we either had to take the train, or we had to pay double to switch to the bus. Under other circumstances, we might well have decided that the smart thing to do was to simply choose somewhere else to spend the afternoon, but since admission to the Cité des Enfants is done by timed tickets, and they quite often sell out, we had bought our tickets online the previous day, which meant that we already had 55€ invested in the expedition.

Fortunately, the RATP had provided a bus alternative (which would count as the train, confused yet?) that would take us over the last part of our trip. But it didn't start at the point where the construction began; that would have been far too easy. No, it started several stops past the point where the construction began, which meant that anyone who wanted to take this replacement bus would have to first get to the starting point, which meant that instead of taking the 4 to the 7, we had to take the 4 to the 5 to the bus pretending to be the 7. (If you would find it helpful, here's a map to the Paris metro system. The Cité is at Porte de la Villette, in the northeast corner, and our local station is St. Michel-Notre Dame, smack in the middle of the map.) 

We did, ultimately, manage to figure things out, and get to the museum, where I managed to retrieve our tickets from the machine without further issues, and we proceeded into the museum. Highlights were:

• The lights exhibit (jeux de lumière)
• The "alien room" (part of the universe exhibit). [I have great pictures of the kids with green skin from the funky lighting, but I haven't posted pictures of the kids on my blog since I discovered that some unknown person was downloading all, and only, pictures of Cherry from my last blog. If you want to see them, let me know.]
• The housing exhibit (housing for tomorrow)

Going home we decided to avoid the whole bus that was pretending it was a train issue, and took the tram to the bus to another bus to our apartment.

In which I whine about the difficulty of blogging

I'm not sure why, but I've found blogging to be a lot more difficult this time around. I suspect that part of it is due to the fact that it doesn't really feel like we're doing very many new things this time: we'd already been to Père Lachaise and to the Cité des Sciences, which is where we went on Sunday, and it seems a little like I'm rehashing old ground. Since we don't have to deal with residency issues or school issues, those aren't producing stories, and other than seeing the Crown of Thorns, we've very much repeated things that we've done before, mostly at the request of the kids.

In which we commune with the dead

One of the things that we did before we came to Paris was to ask the kids what they were most excited about doing in Paris. Sapphire was especially excited about going to the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, Ezio wanted to go to the Cité des Sciences, and Cherry wanted to go to a cemetery.

So after breakfast on Saturday we figured out what the best route was to Le Cimetière du Père Lachaise and headed off to see what we could see. ("To see what we could see, to see what we could see.") And, well, it was a cemetery, so mostly what we saw was tombstones and mausoleums and flowers of all three varieties: living, dead, and plastic. We found what had been Gioachino Rossini's tomb before his body was exhumed and transfered to Italy. (His wife's body is still there; evidently she was not worth transferring.) We saw the tomb of Baron Haussmann, famous for redesigning Paris in the mid-19th century. We saw the tomb of the novelist Colette (of Gigi fame). And we saw Jim Morrison's tomb, at Cherry's request, since she thought it was fascinating that he died in the bathtub. (You all know who he was. OK, fine, here's a link.)

Of course we saw lots of other tombs as well. Some with gorgeous examples of sculpture, others rather plain. Some containing the remains of centenarians, others the remains of infants. Some obviously well cared for, others rather decrepit. Some containing the remains of entire families, others the remains of only one person.

And then, to celebrate the fact that we were only visiting the cemetery, and not yet there permanently, we headed across town to Pierre Hermé for macarons: cucumber-vanilla, rose, chocolate, raspberry, caramel, passion fruit, . . ..

In which we kiss the Crown of Thorns

The idea of a relic, or religious object, such as a bone from a saint, or a sliver of wood from the cross, is a very important one to Catholics. They preserve such relics carefully for veneration and as a tangible reminder of the faith. One of the most significant of these relics, is the Crown of Thorns, which is housed at the Cathédrale de Notre Dame in Paris. Normally the crown is kept hidden away, but on the first Friday of every month there is a veneration service for the crown, and this year, for the first time, we were able to go to it.

The service was at 3:00, and we arrived shortly before it began, due in large part to some disorganization and poor planning on our part (apparently, we were not supposed to wash that pair of Blaise's pants, since the other pair was the one that was actually visibly dirty), and so we ended up slipping into the back third of the church just as the organ began to play for the procession.  We sat and stood through some singing and scripture passages, and prayers, and then the priest announced that anyone who wished to would be able to come up for personal veneration. We sat and waited, unsure of precisely what was going on, and what we were supposed to do. There were crowds of people up at the front of the alter, and men with long white capes with a stylized red cross on the sides patrolling the aisles. The kids squirmed. People stood up and left the church, and others came and took their places. And we waited. A woman came around with papers about the crown of thorns, which she gave to each of us, in French. (We were offered English, but Blaise insisted that we could all read French.). More people came and left and asked questions of the men in white cloaks, and the kids squirmed and whined some more. And still we waited.

After nearly an hour of this waiting, I at last began to understand the behavior of the people up at the front of the cathedral. They had begun with the people sitting in the wings off to the sides of the alter, and had brought them up by row to venerate the crown. And then, after that, had begun the slow process of allowing those in the main section of the nave to go up, row by row, to the front of the alter to venerate the crown. When they had reached about the midpoint of the nave, it was at last clear what was going on, and we could see the rows of people getting up, one at a time, and moving to the center aisle to go forward. By this point there were only a dozen rows of people ahead of us, and then seven, and then three, and then, at last, it was our turn, and we rose respectfully and joined the column of the faithful inching their way toward the front of the church.

Slowly we crept toward the front of the church, where a man (a Knight, in fact) held the crown (encased in a glass circlet) on a satin pillow and turned from side to side to allow the two lines of people to venerate the crown in turn, while two men on either side wiped the glass after each person. We arrived, finally, at the very front and, in imitation of those preceding us, crossed ourselves, kissed the crown, and bowed, resting our foreheads briefly on the glass, then moved to the side to walk back up the aisle and out of the cathedral and back to our apartment.

In which we visit some of our old haunts

When our kids were in 4th and 1st grades and preschool, we spent 14 months living in the Paris area in Fontenay-sous-Bois, a suburb just to the east of Paris. (If you are a glutton for punishment, you can read about that year's adventures at Five Kansans in Paris.) Today, at the kids' request, we hopped on the RER and headed for Val de Fontenay, our former train station.

We started our afternoon in Fontenay by heading to the bakery that we had frequented during our time there in in order to pick up some sandwiches for a picnic lunch. Sapphire had suggested that it would be exciting if the people working there were to recognize us, and I had assured her that it was almost certain that they would not.  After all, it had been three years since we left, the kids looked a lot different, and sometimes the turnover at places like that can be quite high. So we headed in, and were greeted with, "Bonjour Madame," which was as expected, and walked over to look at the sandwiches in the glass case. And then I asked Cherry, in English, what kind of sandwich she wanted. All of a sudden I saw a light dawn on the faces of the women who working there, "Votre enfants ont grandi! La petite n'est pas petite! Vous avez retourné à Fontenay?" So we talked a little, the returning Americans and the bakers, about what we were doing in Fontenay and how long we were planning to stay in the area. 

Then we walked through our apartment complex (there were new "pelouses interdites" signs, and the hill going up to the playground had been torn up to allow work on the city's heating system) and behind Cherry's maternelle (preschool) enroute to the Parc des Epivans, which was a favorite of the kids when we were living in Fontenay. We arrived at 1:30 to discover that, despite the claims of the Fontenay website that the park was no longer closing for lunch every day, the entrance was locked, and we would have to wait until 2:00 to gain entry, so we sat on a patch of grass across the road and ate our sandwiches in the shadow of the cemetery wall and waited for the gates to be unlocked. Inside we discovered that the saddest of the pieces of play equipment had been replaced by something new (and much cooler) and that none of the blackberry bushes in the woods had even begun to set fruit, much less to have anything ready to eat.

Two hours or so later, we headed back out of the park and toward École Henri Wallon, which was where Sapphire and Ezio had had CLIN (with apologies, the link goes to a Google translation of a French wikipedia page) classes during the year that we lived in Fontenay, hoping to arrive at dismissal time, and hoping that their teacher would still be there teaching the CLIN class. We arrived just as the guardian opened the gates to the school and the students began to pulse through the gates. We waited patiently, remembering that the CLIN class had always been among the last through the gates, and finally, just as nearly all the waiting parents had been met by their children, we saw the CLIN students come out, led by M. Gutierrez, their teacher. And so we went in through the gate, and talked with him a little, and he introduced Sapphire and Ezio to all of the other teachers standing there, and commented on how big Cherry had gotten. And then we headed back toward the train station by way of the Auchan.

At this point, it's important to realize that I haven't brought a purse on a trip to Europe since I was in high school, and part of the uniform for girls included carrying a navy blue purse. Since then, I've always carried the important stuff in a money belt and stuffed what cash I would need for the day's essentials into a pant pocket for easy access. Through many trips to Europe this has worked beautifully, and so I blithely set off late last week, money belt safely strapped around my waist with passports and credit card, and purse safely left on the kitchen counter back in Illinois. This morning when I went to put on a dress for the day (the first time since we arrived that it's been warm enough for one) I discovered the error of my ways. Accessing a money belt under a dress would be tricky, to say the least, and of course the dress didn't have pockets. Fortunately, Sapphire had brought her small denim purse with her, so I appropriated it for the trip, stuck my credit card, 20€, and my phone inside, put on the money belt containing everybody's passports, and headed out the door with the kids.

Part of our rational for making the trip today instead of some other day was that we needed something (in the interest of not mortifying my youngest I'll give no further details) that was not readily available in the local supermarchés, but which I suspected that I might be able to find in the giant hypermarchés of the suburbs. So the last stop on our trip to Fontenay was a stop by the Auchan to pick up the mystery item as well as a couple packages of cookies for the trip home. All was going beautifully; we'd found what we needed, waited in line to have it rung up at the cash register, I'd put in the brand spanking new chip-and-signature credit card that we'd gotten just for this trip, and which I'd used a dozen times already, the card had been accepted by the machines, and I just needed to sign the receipt and be on my way. And then, "Avez-vous une pièce d'identité?" Well, yes, but it was in my money belt, which was under the dress that I was wearing, and hardly easy to access. "Passporte?" So there I was, in the checkout lane of a suburban hypermarket, trying to get at my passport by simultaneously pulling up my dress and pulling down my money belt in a desperate attempt to avoid both a run-in with the Auchan security guards and a display of my underwear. The cashier took down the necessary information, handed back the passport and receipt, and then, with as much dignity as I could muster, we headed back to the train station for the trip back to Paris.

In which we finally get out and do something in Paris

It's been a fairly dull early visit to Paris, what with Ezio recovering from a virus that attacked both of his achilles tendons, and then ending up with a massive bruise on the top of one of his feet after Sapphire fell on it. We ended up spending most of our first few days here hanging around the apartment, where Ezio discovered that he can indeed play games of Civ Rev using someone other than the Greeks, and everyone went very slowly crazy in our tiny apartment.

Of course, we went out some—to the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimonie on Sunday afternoon (where one of the security guards was so concerned about Ezio's limping that he offered to get him a wheelchair, which Ezio naturally refused), because French national museums are free on the first Sunday of the month, and to the 6:30 p.m. mass at Notre Dame that evening. I had hoped that the experience would be less opaque than the mass at St Mark's Basilica that I went to many years ago, since I know some French and have become Catholic in the intervening years. Alas, it was not to be—it appears that I should spend some time polishing my Latin.

On Monday Ezio stayed in the apartment all day while Sapphire and Cherry and I ventured to the Decathlon to buy Cherry a sleeping bag to go with her air mattress since out apartment officially only sleeps four, and to the playground at Square Paul Langevin (which as Cherry observed should really be called Triangle Paul Langevin). 

Tuesday the four of us ventured to the playground while Blaise was at a talk—Ezio on crutches the whole way—and then back to the apartment afterward. By yesterday evening he was feeling confident enough to go out without crutches, and so we walked the block from our apartment to the Pont de l'Archevêché and sat by the banks of the Seine for a bit before heading back up to our apartment. 

By the time we were all awake this morning and breakfasted, it was clear that we should need to get out of the apartment in a more serious way this morning, and Ezio was confident that his feet and ankles would no longer give him any problems. So we headed off for the Jardin des Plantes, leaving Blaise to philosophize or logicize or something like that. Walking slowly, we headed up Rue Monge to the Rue des Ecoles and then along Rue Jusseiu until we came into the jardin through the side entry. We spent about three hours in the jardins, and came to the following conclusions:

1) The playground in the Jardin des Plantes is lame for any child old enough to be out of diapers. 

2) The Jardin Alpin, with its narrow dirt and stone paths winding through outcroppings of stone and a variety of different flowering plants and bushes was really cool and we would all like to live there. 

3) The Jardin d'école Botanique was moderately interesting, mainly because there were a lot of water-garden beds in which we could hunt for frogs and fish.

After dinner we took a family promenade to the Hôtel de Ville de Paris, and sat by the fountains and looked at the building, and tried to figure out when it had been built, since it seems to be stylistically French Renaissance but the statues decorating the outside were primarily of people from the 18th and 19th centuries. In case you were curious, the building was completely destroyed during the Paris commune, and a replica was built over a period of 20 years at the end of the 19th century. 

In which Cherry writes a letter (faithfully reproduced below)

Dear Evey,

I am in pairis do you want a flashing ifltower or a colored, if it is flashing it can't be colored our Apartment is ttttiiiinnnyyy the stairs don't even have a railing ether O and by the way Happy birthday!!! I get to sleep on a air matrice also the food is so good here I wish you were here!!!!!