Paris - Day 4

Allrighty, so we're up to Day 4! Andy, Carsten, and I were on our own since Jess had to go back to school in Nantes, so we bravely conquered the Louvre! Carsten usually gets up sometime around 7:00 +/- 30 min, so throughout the vacation we just woke up when he did. We thought letting him get all of his night sleep was important since his daily naps would be erratic, and plus, most things didn't open until 9:00 am anyway, so that usually gave us plenty of time to get ready and head out. However, this particular morning, he slept in until 8:00 am, which was quite nice for us.

This reminds me that I forgot to mention that we had daylight savings time over here on this particular weekend, and there was no need to adjust Carsten. In fact, he adjusted all by himself. On Sunday morning he got up at 7:00 am new time, which was 6:00 am old time. So somehow, he knew that he should sleep 1 less hour and then that would put him on the next schedule. Seriously, he did it all by himself. :)

Ok, back to Day 4. So Carsten got up late, and we hurried out the door to the bakery we had been buying breakfast at. Pastries are amazing in Paris, and they were relatively cheap too. So we had chocolate & fruit pastries, croissants, croissants with pudding, and one morning Andy even had flan with apples for breakfast. Let me tell you, this was one of the really amazing parts of the vacation. Andy and I haven't had much in the way of baked goods, mostly because I have no idea how to bake over here yet and partially because it's really not good for your waistline to have sweets in the house (at least, for me it's not!). We were also happy that we had yummy food that was cheaper by quite a bit than the hotel breakfast, which I'm sure also contained pastries. So yay for saving some money!

Once we had our breakfast, we made our way to the metro and on to the Louvre. I'd like to make another aside here: metro travel with a stroller in Paris is NOT easy. They haven't made the metro system handicap accessible, which we found to be a bit weird. So not only were there tons of stairs, when you went through the ticket machine, the only way through was a turnstyle, which is very difficult to get an empty stroller through. We never actually tried it when Carsten was in the stroller because I think he would have got a nasty smack in the head. I think next time we hit major cities we'll check out the more touristy transportation (like buses and such) just to avoid this issue. On the other hand, perhaps other cities are better, like Zurich, which has elevators and escalators everywhere. And their ticket checking system is mostly an honor system (there are random checks with a steep fine if you don't have a proper ticket), so they don't have any of the evil turnstyle devices.

Ok, back to the Louvre! When we got to the Louvre, it was sunny and beautiful, so we ate our breakfast pastries outside and then took a few pictures. We then went to go get in line and since we had a stroller and a baby, they put us in the front of the line and sent us down the elevator - what nice treatment! :) I guess they are aware that young children and lines really aren't such a good combination. So, I don't know how much everyone knows about the Louvre, but the iconic pyramid (pictured below) is actually the entrance, and the museum is the huge palace that surrounds the square. We were not aware that it was so huge - seriously. We mostly just thought it had some paintings and the Mona Lisa. We were wrong. It also had a bunch of artifacts from Greek, Roman, early civilizations (Mesopotamia, Persia, Assyria, and Babylon), and Iran. This was really quite fun to wander around, and one of our favorite parts was the Code of Hammurabi, which was the earliest known written law and was the precursor to civilizations. Yes, I know, we get geeked about stuff like this :). The only bummer about all these exhibits were that all the plaques were in French only. We could have gotten an audio guide, but I really don't think that would have worked well with Carsten, so we didn't. Even though we didn't know everything we were looking at, it was fun to wander and wonder. We actually spent most of the day here and I'm pretty sure we missed quite a few things, but we did see most of what we wanted to :). And the best part was that Carsten really only had a couple minutes of crying, and otherwise was either interested in his surroundings or sleeping. What a kid :). I think my favorite part was the Apartments of Napolean, which were grandiose and quite different from the Palace of Versailles (see photo below).

Ok, so here are the Louvre photos: enjoy!

The Louvre! The building in the background was the actual museum, and the pyramid is the entrance.

We went to the Mona Lisa first because we thought it would just get busier as the day went on. It was a bit anti-climactic since we already knew what it looked like.... :) This is me and my 'Mona Lisa' pose. 

Family photo in the Louvre!

Passed out baby :).

I should mention at this point that it's a time honored tradition in my family to take silly photos in a museum. This came about because my dad likes to read plaques in detail, and we don't feel quite as obligated. So we amuse ourselves :). Since we couldn't read any of the French plaques anyway, we didn't feel at all bad amusing ourselves, as you will see... For the record we actually did very much enjoy the museum based on its own merit as well.

There's a limited amount of silliness you can do with a sleeping baby, but I did my best!

Funniness. 

There really was a missing head here, so we felt the need to fill it.

Venus de Milo. Totally famous. Totally seen it :).

Carsten got in on the silliness!

Napoleon's apartments! Amazing :).

I think this was Assyria. Simply amazing. I don't think I've seen stuff like this before in person. I know that my Dad would really like this exhibit (and the entire museum), and he would definitely need the audio guide since he likes knowing details :).

Code of Hammurabi! Very cool

These things made really detailed and cool imprints. They were in the Iran exhibit.

We conquered the Louvre! It was pretty sunny, so both Andy and Carsten are sporting hats and sunglasses. There was a random lady who walked past us and deliberately took a picture of Carsten, so she must of thought he was cute. Mostly she just creeped us out.

It was mid-afternoon when we emerged from the Louvre and we decided to head back to the Eiffel Tower in the hopes of a short line to go up to one of the decks. However, while the lines were shorter, we stood in line for about 10 min, and didn't really move. So we once again, opted to take photos of the entire tower and we didn't bother going up. As you can see, the Eiffel Tower, like most things, is much more photogenic in the sun.

Eiffel Tower in the sun.

Carsten fell asleep at the Eiffel Tower and since the metro tends to wake him up, that meant we needed to walk somewhere. We weren't excited about this prospect since we had already done so much walking in the Louvre (seriously, it's huge), but we found that the other Statue of Liberty (that's right, Paris has one too) was <1 mile away. So we started walking to it, but when we noticed that we were the only tourists around, we opted to turn back for safety reasons (nothing says 'mug me' like a stroller, baby, camera, and diaper bags which all indicate that we are tourists in a non-tourist part of town). By the time we made it back to the train station, Carsten was awake, so we headed back to our hotel area for supper and baby bedtime.

So, that's Day 4 in a nutshell! I'll warn you that Day 5 really wasn't exciting since all we did was travel back to Zurich, but I'll tell you more about that later.