Trip to Paris

Aunt Carin is visiting this week! We're all having a great time with her. She ran around with us last week, taking Pascale to school and Josie to the playground. And best of all, she watched the kids so Bernie and I could go to Paris! We had a wonderful weekend there. We stayed on the Left Bank near Les Invalides and wandered around the university sector in the evenings. The first night, we ate at this amazingly cool-looking art deco restaurant that was totally touristy and the food was mediocre at best. The next night, we ate at more of a neighborhood place where the food was much better but the service was slooow. They simply could not conceive that anyone would want to spend less than 2.5 hours eating dinner. We went to the Musee D'Orsay, which is my second favorite museum in the world, not least because they have Pompon's polar bear there. Then we crossed the Seine and went window shopping at all the fancy stores, and bought berets for the girls. We got ice cream at this gelato place, and it took them like 5 minutes to put the ice cream on the cones. I was wondering how it could possibly take that long, then they handed us the cones and the ice cream was arranged in the shape of a flower. It was so cool.

On Sunday morning we took a ride on the ferris wheel that's located at the end of the Champs Elysees. It was absolutely terrifying. I kept thinking that if we all die, we can't even sue. We lived through it, though, and it was a good time to be there because the Veteran's Day parade was going down the Champs Elysees, and the ferris wheel was a good vantage point from which to see it. After the parade, the soldiers were walking around, and quite a few of them had a sword in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. It was an interesting contrast.

Today, we went to St Paul's (which was closed due to some possibly terrorist-related issues) and across the Millennium Bridge to the Tate Modern. At this moment, there's a 20-foot-high sculpture of a spider in the courtyard. The girls really like sculpture, and they especially liked this one, since they could walk under it and touch it.

Here's Les Invalides, right by our hotel:

Here we are with the bear sculpture at the Musee D'Orsay:


Here I am looking dramatic:

I bought a hat, which they put in this neat box:

This is our funky hotel room:

Veterans Day Parade, as seen from the ferris wheel:

Back in London, Josie liked my hatbox:

Here's Aunt Carin at the playground:

Here are the girls outside the Tate:



And the girls and Carin on the Millenium Bridge: