Day Two in Paris (or is it Day One?)

We all slept well. We decided Sarah should not sleep in the lof when we remembered that she has the tendency to sleep walk.... Sarah wins the prize for sleeping until 10am.

Deb, Em and Sarah venture out to forge for some breakfast products. Just down the hill at the intersection of our street and St. Germaine we find a yummy boulongerie...one pain chocolate, one crossiant (regular) and one bread with nuts, raisins and orange to bring back to the apartment. We stop in a tiny supermarket and buy some ground coffee for our maker. It is not raining, sky is blue with some clouds and it's high 60's. We notice, as Marc did, that there are restaurants from every corner of the earth here. We pass a Tibetian one, Vietnamese one, Greek one....Emily locates all the countries for us on her mental map.

Yummy breakfast at our little kitchen table with bench.

Raincoats and umbrellas in hand we walk down to St. Germaine to explore. We end up walking around St. Germaine and St. Michel intersection...looking in all the little shops. The girls are especially enthralled with area with cobblestone streets lined with restaurants, men standing in the doorway beckoning you in for some meats. The windows have those raw meat and seafood displays that look oh so appetizing.....to the flies.

There's Notre Dame, so we go. Cross the Seine on Petite Pont. Hoards of people. The line to get in is about 1/4 mile long, so we admire from afar. Try to tell the girls how old it is....built in the 12th century? They are more interested in the boats going down the Seine.

We find a Metro station (St. Michel) and Marc buys the 5 day pass, we're set. We take the Metro (not as clean as the Tube, Sarah notes) to a station we think is near the Tour Eiffel. It's not that near and we walk the wrong way at first...but finally turn around and see it. We sit at the Champs de Mars. Lines to go into the Tour Eiffel are very long.....longer than at Notre Dame. We decide to admire from afar (again). The girls are hungry...so we look for a metro stop, but none is obvious, so we hop a bus that looks like it is going to Jardin Luxumborg. We get off at Monparnasse and look for a cafe with outside seating. It's on and off sunny. The garcon takes about 30 minutes to realize we are there....finally comes. Em will blog about the food in her own blog.

We catch a metro home. Our metro stop is Maubert Mutualite. We stop at a Patisserie on the way up the hill and buy one chocolate hazelnut and one fig/pear/pistache tart for later (or as it turned out, for just a tiny bit later with some mint tea upstairs).

Rest time: Pink Panther for the girls, reading for Deb and of course napping for Marc. We all end up sleeping a bit and wake at 7:30.

Random thought: just as many smokers as when we were here last time...still no insight here. A lot of German tourists here.

Dinner will be somewhere in the neighborhood. No reservations. Sarah is happy.