Paris! Montmarte and Pigalle...

Our first day in Paris, we hopped on the subway and went to hike up Montmarte-- it was a beautiful chilly day, and so there were no tourists. We looked into all of the fragrant cheese shops ("Like ze feet of ze angels!"), spice stalls, tea places, boulengeries, patisseries (sorry for the bad french spelling, ya'll), got ourselves some crepes, admired the windmills, and peeked into the cool dark church. We caught a tiny bit of mass. A group of nuns were playing hammered-dulcimers and singing, in that high ethereal echoey medieval way, filling up the stone columns and floating roof. It was very moving-- my inner Catholic stirred again.
We liked the area so much that we came back again on our last day in Paris-- this time it was a bright sunny day, and the steps were mobbed with loungers and pushy peddlers...

Here's Rosie rolling down the mountain.



WHEEEE! We loved Montemart.
Here's the cloudy day view:

And a poster for HORSE milk we saw in a biologuque store, on the scenic walk up to Montemarte and Sacre Couer
CREPES. See all those jars of nutella?
Spice store...

Butcher...The Moulin Rouge!
Yes.

Lyon, 2

Overlooking Vieux Lyon is the amazing Fourviere Basillica, dedicated to Mary. The mosaics inside were so luminous and moving, I cried. This one is actually from the teeny chapel next door, dedicated to Joseph. Isn't this lovely? Rosie saw it and said, "Mommy, Daddy and Rosie Jo!"
The front of the Basilica...

We ate at an incredibly fancy and delicious restraunt called the Restaurant Fourviere. The waiters patiently overlooked the fact that Rosie refused to eat unless under the table, pretending to be a little lost girl.
me: "oh, I sure wish I had my little girl Rosie. She used to love to eat meat under the table, but she is lost! I don't know where she is!"
Rosie, under the table: giggle giggle, HOWP.

And there she eats her daily 12 calories to sustain her life.
This is in fronf of the restaurant, you can see a sliver of the view in the background.And down the hill a little ways is the Gallo-Roman museum, full of very COOL artifacts from ancient Roman Lyon, including these creepy and not-at-all-comforting grave markets. "Oh look, there's great aunt Tessy, wailing in agony from the underworld. Awwww...."
Matt as a Gaullic Mercury
Here you can see how the Pagain Gallic God Lugus or Sylvanus or Sucellos with his cup and hammer morphed into a recognizable Romanized version of himself, and then into Mercury.
Playing in the cool marble pebbles of a roman ruin...


To get down from the Basillica, you can follow a beautiful Rose and fruit-tree lined path straight down and then...
Down ten zillion medieval stone stairs! They kept turning corners so you'd think you were almost done, peek around a building and BAM! three hundred more steps!
Rosie loved it, we lifted her up in her stroller and she flapped her arms the whole way down, "I'm FLYING! WHEEEEE!"
My legs were all jelloey the rest of the day.At the bottom of the killer stairs, you're suddenly in the old Medieval quarter, full of delicious and welcoming little Buchoun eateries, as below:

And this cool cathedral where Rosie ran around and we watched people filling their waterbottles from the fountain

The whole quarter is riddled with secret tunnels. Some are open, and they reveal these beautiful lit courtyards. It was very cool and romantic and ancient-feeling. We found a medieval stuff store down one of these! Corsets and torques and drinking horns, oh my! Matt couldn't persuade me to get a torque, but I got a lovely and tasteful celtic hairclip.
Look at the stunned expression on this kid: "HYOOOOOOG ice cweam."


Across the river is this impressive place, and a cool fountain by the statue of liberty guy with web-footed sea-steeds.
Rue du Beouf.
Rosie's favorite barf-o-matic dizzy-making spinner toy at the park:
This park is really where we spent most of our time in Lyon, spinning around and around, avoiding the HUGE kids playing on the very cool dangerous big-kid equipment, oggling high-heels and breezy dry-clean-only dresses and stylish hairdo-s of the other moms and the leather shoes and pink pressed shirts of the other dads....
Yeah, we're slobs.
This, is a child-sized portion of french fries. Allegedly.

And That was Lyon!

Lyon!

At the end of our short three days in Normandy, we drove to Versailles to hand off the rental car to Liz and Andrew. Were we sad to see the car go? No.
Unfortunately we picked a bad place to rendevous, car-wise. Turns out, VERSAILLES SUCKS.
See that mob? It was insane. They were pushing and shouting and demanding entrance immediately, and that was before they even managed to park. And Rosie, our little stress barometer, completely turned herself inside out with rage and fury. So as we're creeping along in impossible traffic through unmarked alleyways with no signs towards, you know, THE PALACE, we all nearly combusted. But we finally parked (what one-way, wrong-way, no parking sign??), threw all of our stuff onto the sidewalk, Matt managed to find L and A in that huge mass of people, and I vowed to NEVER EVER drive again, tried to calculate the future cost of family and individual therapy to recover from that drive. Seriously, I'm shocked we didn't all come out with white hair.

We lobbed the keys at L and A, they serenely drove away on their own adventure, and we took Rosie on an apology-carousel. I wonder how many fun kid things are motivated by parental guilt?
Notice her swollen puffy face??So then it was a simple matter of getting onto the metro, getting to the Gare De Lyon in Paris, and onto our high speed train to Lyon, with two rolling suitcases with broken handles, 2 backpacks, one hungry and stressed toddler, and a stroller.
But we made it onto our cushy train, even found the right seats in the right car, snagged a couple of pastries, baguette sandwiches and orangina for lunch, and settled in:

We got to watch the lovely country side go past and relax for two hours, and then *voila!* we were there.
By some impossibly happy luck, our hotel (Hotel Du Simplon), just happened to be right next to the station-- no other metros or transfers necessary. Just a lovely stroll through a park, down a little road past fruit stands and kabob shops, and we were there. It was a wonderfully-walking friendly place-- two exciting playgrounds and a fountain, and a wonderful pedestrial shopping ally full of ice cream shops and cafes. And it was suddenly warm!
The next morning we set out (after a lovely hotel breakfast of croissants and baguettes with jam, juice and hot chocolate for the kid), there was an open-air market happening in the square.
Tables heaped with unidentifiable cured meats and sausages,
Dr. Suess-esque towers of fresh cheese! And crackly, floury crusty bread!
And fragrant beds of flowers!
And CHEVRE. AND YES. The sign says ONE EURO.
ONE EURO! I splutter in disbelief. Why? How? Why is America's food culture so dumb, that we have snobbified excellent simple food, and are willing to stuff our faces with unexamined revoltingness?? Look at this bounty! gasp, splutter, choke. Yummmm.
Veg.
*gyaaaah* These tiny chickens are spit roasted over a pan of new potatoes, which get all greasy and salty and divooooon.

All that, and African Shirts!! Along one side of the square, there were all these vendors selling shoe-polished lean African statuary and bright soccer shirts, like the ones below (which I didn't take...this is just a picture from the web. But you get the idea.)
Aaaaand, puppies. Around a corner, there was a whole isle of pets and pet food and pet beds. And this widdle guy, ooh, squigga wigga... I love their purple tongues...While we were in Lyon, Rosie discovered Croissants. Just yesterday she picked up her little toy lizard, and said, "Lizard's hungry! Wants a croissant!" It was lovely to go to a little bakery every morning, get a bagful of pastries, and plant ourselves on a park bench for our little uncivilized petite dejeuner.
I loved the little I got of French Foodways. No wonder the french are thinner than us blobbified Americans! We illustrated the difference exactly in our approach to breakfast.
A french person would go to the bakery, buy one delicious pastry, and enjoy it fastidiously for an hour with a teeeeensy cup of strong black coffee and a cigarette or two.
An American goes to the same bakery, FREAKS OUT at how much good stuff there is, takes one --heck TWO!-- of each, and then snorks it all down in one guilt 15 minute sitting.
That was basically us. Only not so much the guilt. More like-- you remember the scene in Chocolat when the count breaks into the store front window and showers himself in chocolate, then cries and eats himself to sleep? I think that was the spirit in which we lived our culinary lives for a week or two.