Saturday: The Real "Paris With Kids"

I did survive Paris with four kids today, but in the words of a semi-English friend, I feel pretty knackerred. I think this photo pretty much summed it up:

In a day of wrong turns and lines that were longer than expected, when you are hauling a sleeping 35 pound sack of potatoes while waiting for the wrong train on the wrong platform, how else should I look?

We got to Paris around 10:00, armed with our book "Paris With Kids" to guide us. We found a parking structure that I only had to go down one level for, and parked by the stairs that showed the metro. When we headed down the stairs, it landed us in a tunnel that was blockaded at both ends and the only thing there was a homeless person who was sleeping against the wall (insert dozens of questions here). No go on the metro.

We found a different exit that landed us in a mall, which had a metro exit just outside. We opted to go first to the Museum of Inventions (my translation), since I thought it would be a good fit. The first floor went well, and we headed up to the second (see their faces full of anticipation).

When we got there, a very grumpy security guard had Andrew’s number from the second he walked through the doors and touched one of the precious cast iron inventions in the room. He came over and in angry French with a few punctuations of English let me know very clearly that there was 1) no touching the inventions or the platforms, 2) no running, 3) no touching any of the glass cases. Because they are FRAGILE. He might have added in another couple of things, but that’s as much as I could understand. Note to everyone: this museum is NOT a children’s museum.

Andrew did well until he did something that involved touching buttons on a screen (that he was allowed to touch) too many times or something like that, and angry security guard made it very clear we were about to be shown the door. The crazy thing was that Andrew really was being good. I have to guess that since French children are so WELL BEHAVED (there’s a Wall Street Journal article all about it), maybe that’s why the guard went berserk--Andrew was just too much for him.

Item number two on our agenda was to find the home of Nicholas Flammel (Harry Potter, Book 1). He was a real person, and Mason and Katie are doing a school project about him. We had our “Paris With Kids” book to guide us, but clearly it didn’t work very well for us since we didn’t realize until after we’d gone 7 or 8 blocks that his house was 6 blocks back the other direction. AAAAHHHH. It’s one thing to make that kind of mistake on your own, but about 100 times worse when your trying to make backtracking seem like a fun adventure to four tired kids. But here we are at a house he built, which is the oldest one in Paris. Checked off our list.

And here’s where we stopped for lunch. Too bad you can't hear the man yell-singing Bob Marley songs. It really helped to create the full picture of randomness with the crazy painting, cartoon fountains and old cathedral.

After that, it was time to take the metro. We made it to the middle of the city where we went to Saint Chappel. “Paris With Kids” said the stained glass windows were a must see. What I wished I had seen was that once I had gotten everyone through security, we would still have to wait in a line like this:

So I let the kids take a break and play on their ipods while I waited in line. I’m sure I looked like the parent of the year.

I gave Katie my camera to hold, since I had Chloe in my arms. She generally just takes pictures of pigeons and the like, but she did snap this one that I liked. I helps me remember the good parts about holding Chloe A LOT during our adventure.

After about 20 minutes, we got into the chapel and looked at the windows. Not as stunning as I had hoped for that much effort.

But then we went upstairs, and were rewarded with this:

Probably worth it.

After that, we went nearby to the Conciergerie, which was a palace, justice building and prison and various times. In whatever form, it was very beautiful:

We took a couple of wrong turns, and tried to be excited that we got to walk across the Seine River twice before getting to Notre Dame. It looked like there were lines there as well, so we enjoyed the view, and decided to try for our last stop: Musee D’Orsay. If only I could have told myself at this moment that there were lines EVERYWHERE, so don’t bother going to the museum since they were even worse there, we would have all been saved a lot of walking. But what fun would that have been? Would that have helped us build our characters? I think not.

We took the RER train going the wrong direction, and had to switch platforms (that’s the first photo I posted). By this time, Chloe had fallen asleep riding on my back, so I couldn’t take her off. The only position that was comfortable was leaning forward--so that’s how I waited for the train.

As I said, the lines we long, so we decided to call it a day. By this point, Andrew was SPENT. I finally caved and gave him my iphone to play on and Megan would just guide his footsteps, since he went a lot faster that way. That is how desperate I had gotten to get the walking over with.

There really were a lot of bright spots to the day. A woman shared her last 2 oreos with us after the snack machine broke in between her snack and the snacks I was desperately trying to get to for my starving kids. Nice people gave up their metro seats for us. The buildings were beautiful and the museum was really interesting (although hostile). So--we were glad we went. But we’ll need a couple of days recovery before we attempt it next week.

Once we got home, I had one thing left on my list. Katie had been asking for the past couple of days to go canoeing with me in the lake, and we were able to finish off the day like this: