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.