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.