Paris—Day 4

We actually arose on time this morning, despite our late night last night entertaining our washing machine. We are confident that no washing machine has ever washed clothes with the ferocity seen in our washing machine last night. Our tiny load in that tiny machine took almost two hours to wash, rinse, and spin, and to cap it off, we had to hang them to dry. Oh well, we're still grateful for the machine.

We got up early so we could get to the Louvre before the real crowds started, and we were glad we did. We still waited in a long, bust fast line with the entire Parisian population of visiting Asians, but it was worth the early morning get go. Apparently Asians are prompt morning people, yes? Seriously, we've only seen six of them in the last four days, but today we saw hundreds all queued up and ready for their time with the art.

The Louvre is, indeed, a spectacular palace, museum, and general crazy place. Visitors be warned: the map looks like, tells you, and does everything in its power to convince you everything on floor one is on the same plane. Don't be fooled, however, because stairs.

STAIRS.

STAIRS!!!!

My thighs'll be burnin' tomorrow!

Despite the exercise, we enjoyed some time with famous works such as Dear Mona, the Jocund:

Venus de Milo:A guarding sphinx:
A room full of hieroglyphs that you can actually enter:
and Hammurabi's code:
My favourite two however, were the boxing/unboxing room we spied on our way up to the exhibits:

and the Medieval Louvre, the foundations of the original defense fortress found at the lowest level:

We also spied the Opera Garnier on our walk around.
We shopped, ran up and down our favourite street, Rue Montorgueil, and did something I've always wanted to do: we enjoyed lunch at a sidewalk café as we watched passersby and enjoyed our Lebanese meal. I seriously need to identify the spice used in my chicken, because it made my very heart sing. Liz's falafel wasn't as good as yesterday, but it satisfied her (at that moment) unconquerable need for a little nourishment.

We also stopped to get some gelato and had an interesting experience that happens all the time, but not quite in this way. The shop's proprietors were Italian, and jabbered to each other as they worked, and as non-Italian speakers, we opted for the best method of communication: speaking in French. Usually people opt for English as the neutral third language, but this time it was French. It's good we weren't haggling or trading stocks, because my French could not have accomplished much more than ordering two gelato whose flavours were posted on them. Phew!

We took an early evening trip to Sacre Coeur, up on Montmartre, the artistic center of Paris for the last 150 years or so. It's not the nicest part of town, but it was interesting to ride the train out and enjoy the area on the mount. The sudden hill is so high that the top of Sacre Coeur is the second highest point in Paris, after the Eiffel Tower, of course. We snuck in to look around, and enjoyed some chant by the resident nuns there, but slipped out before the Ash Wednesday service began. We didn't want to leave in the middle, and didn't want to stay for the whole thing, so we opted out. The church, however, was beautiful, and it steadily filled with people as we sat for a few minutes. It was nice to finally see a church with people in it to worship rather than just ogle.

We wandered back home, enjoyed the beautiful evening, and made sure Liz had a pain au chocolate with which she could finish her evening before heading in for a relaxing night. We've been out and about a lot, and we've done most of the things we knew we wanted to do, so we had another moment of gratitude for the apartment, and have settled in for the evening. We've decided that one of the reasons people need vacations after their vacations is that they feel the need to spend the entire time doing things, especially when they don't want to just sit in the hotel room. Having a tiny apartment, even one that's not much bigger than a hotel room, makes a vacation much more like what I think a vacation should be. We'll definitely do it this way again.

This is a shot from our apartment's stairwell. We're on floor 2, which of course means the second floor above the ground floor, but looking at this reminds me how grateful I am to be not on the sixth floor in a place where the apartments have 16 foot ceilings. :)