Last Tango in Paris

Well, our last day, not last tango. We did not have big touring plans for our last day, which was last Sunday. In the morning, we visited the children's park in the Jardin du Luxembourg, as we had done every day except Saturday. Then via Metro we went to Gare du Nord, our train station, to put our big bag in a locker (easier said than done), and then to meet Nicholas and Vincent for lunch nearby. Nicholas was one of my next door neighbors in the 1978-79 school year, when my whole family lived in Venon in the Grenoble region during one of my father's sabbaticals. Nicholas is a few years older than I, and in 1978-79 I was best friends with his younger brother Benoit, who was my age and in my class at school. We had a very nice lunch, first mostly in French, then mostly in English, and it was nice to catch up on Nicholas and his family, as well as to discuss a variety of random topics. The last time I saw Nicholas was around Bastille Day in 1995 (which was a cool time to be in Paris), so there was a lot to catch up on.

Amelia basically slept through lunch in her stroller, and JoJo mostly was quiet and relaxed or made drawings. Amelia woke up just in time to leave, and she ate a late lunch from a doggy bag on the train. The train ride was smooth enough—when the girls got antsy, we set them up with a DVD on a laptop. We didn't have headphones for them with us, but we kept the volume low, and our 5 neighbors in our compartment didn't indicate any annoyance about hearing the Wiggles.

Paris was a lot of fun for us, and by and large the girls did great. Amelia got some kind of yucky schmutz-y thing going on in her eyes, and she clearly was unhappy about it. But the over-the-counter cleansing and treatment agents we got made her unhappier still!

We ate a lot of Italian in Paris—the kids like the pasta, and so do I. We also ate a bunch of crepes, at restaurants and from stands. It was kind of fun watching the crepes get made, which you could do at the stands. The crepes were good, but the one waffle I had was grossly inferior to the ones I've had in Brussels.

At one of our meals JoJo turned to Amelia and said, "Qu'est-ce que tu fait?" ("What are you doing?") It was the most complete expression that I had heard from her in French, and I was very impressed. She seemed pretty pleased with herself when I commented on it.

I will end this post with the rock that JoJo found in Jardin du Luxembourg. She found a rock and remarked that it was the biggest rock she had ever seen. I wasn't too wild about carrying around a big rock (she sort of has a collection), but then I saw the rock, which was about the size of a AA battery (and also strangely shaped). I asked her if she had really never seen a larger rock, and she confirmed it. I guess her vast quadrennial experience was not as vast as I thought, and I smugly pointed out larger rocks. Yep, Daddy proved he's more wordly than his 4 year old.