what can i say? now that we are back in Madison, i am reminded again of that delicious feeling you have when you return home and everything is familiar. sure, we missed our cherries completely this year, but my friend has invited us to come and pick his raspberries tomorrow.
don't get me wrong. i LOVE to travel and this trip was great. i am so glad to have experienced Barcelona and France. but travelling with 2 kids wasn't easy, even though i felt i had prepped pretty well. the girls have some fond memories that they keep talking about (the water park in Barcelona, the puppet show in Lyon), but i'm glad they don't remember all the whining about the long walks. :) i hope Skye will remember some of the beautiful artwork she saw in Barcelona and Paris and be inspired by them. i hope the girls will be enriched by the experience.
in my last entry, i talked a little bit about what we were enjoying in Lyon. looking back, i think Lyon was the one place where i really focused on activities for the children. Barcelona and Paris were mainly for me. :)
what was great about Lyon was staying with our friends, Gregoire and Sophie. they have a beautiful place where the girls felt right at home. on our last day in Lyon, Phil took the girls in the morning, giving me a chance to run off to the Musee des Beaux Arts. it had a really good collection, but what made the time really pleasurable was the fact that the museum was almost completely empty. i could wander around the museum at my own leisure. in the afternoon, we took the girls to La Maison de Guignol to see a puppet show. Guignol is the main character and he usually gets himself into trouble and he enlists the children's help throughout the show. when we bought the tickets, they asked for the names of our girls and in the middle of the show, Guignol suddenly started speaking in broken English, asking Skye and Claire to think of a lullaby to sing to him! he apologized for his bad English, saying it is because he is French. the girls were mesmerized. they didn't sing for Guignol, but they eagerly went backstage at the end of the show to meet the puppeteers and to see the puppets up close.
Lyon is well known for its gastronomy, so we enjoyed really great french cuisine. our friends and Phil's colleagues took us to brasseries that have been around for really long time - our friends pointed out the Art Deco style of the interiors. but what i love most about Lyon are its two rivers - the Saone and the Rhone. the two meet in Lyon so the city is split into three sections: the old part of Lyon, the Presqu'il (the island between the 2 rivers) and the newer section of Lyon. the girls and i spent many pleasant days walking up and down the river.
after 5 days in Lyon, we took the train to Paris. i started to get myself mentally prepared for all the zipping around. our apartment was in the 1st arondissement, a block away from the Louvre, just across the street from a bakery and sandwich shop. Phil went down to the bakery every morning to pick up fresh bread and pastries for breakfast. it was heaven. our first evening in Paris, as i was unpacking, we had the great big windows open and suddenly we hear music from down below. we all peeked down to see a trumpeter, a saxophonist and a keyboard player playing as they strolled down the street. their music wasn't free - they had their plastic cups out - but it was a great way to begin our Paris stay.
the next day, we did the Musee Picasso which was in the La Marais. Phil and i loved La Marais. i think if we ever return to Paris, we would love to stay there. after Picasso, Skye and i went to the Pompidou. we only managed to see the Kandinsky exhibit. they also had a Calder special exhibit, but the wait was too long and Skye was breaking down by then. the view of Paris was amazing from Pompidou. i would love to return to Pompidou as well - there was so much to see there and just too many people to allow for a thorough viewing.
the following day was an outing to the largest flea market in Paris - Marche aux Puces de St. Ouen. not a place to go for a bargain, but it is an amazing place. like London's Portabello. there were beautiful mirrors i wished i could take home, chandeliers in almost every stall, and lots of furniture and silver. we mainly looked and managed to find a few old prints to bring back and frame.
14th July was Bastille day. Phil took Skye early in the morning to see the parade. i wasn't sure how Claire would handle the crowd, so she and i slept in. when we woke up, we looked out our window to see horsemen lined up, getting ready to go to the parade. Claire was so excited!! we watched the planes fly over our building, so we got to see some of the parade from the apartment. :) Skye says watching the parade was one of her favourite things about Paris. there's something about all the pomp and circumstance the children really responded to. i guess we don't have too much of that here in the US.
one final museum for me was the Rodin. i enjoyed it the most because i went by myself and there were very few people there since i got there rather early. sensual...muscular...were words that came to my mind as i walked around Rodin's sculptures. and the garden was impressive. i longed to have a sketchbook there with me so that i could sketch some of the sculptures, but maybe another time.
the girls had fun at the Jardin de Tuileries which was several blocks away from the apartment. at the pond, there was a man who rented out little wooden boats with cloth sails. for 2 euros, the girls got a stick and a boat for half an hour. they could push the boats out into the pond with their sticks and follow them around.
as i mentioned earlier, we enjoyed fresh baked pastries every day. we also enjoyed going to the Vietnamese section of town and eating bowls of pho. the girls and i gorged ourselves on crepes. and some nights, we ate in which the girls preferred. on our last night, we were in the Montmartre neighbourhood and stopped at a fantastic Moroccan restaurant. the tagine and couscous were amazing.
this next paragraph will be about the shopping, so if you hate shopping, you can simply skip over this one. we were in europe at the peak of their sale season. all the stores were having huge sales to clear out everything for the new collection. i didn't go to the big name places, but i had two stores in mind, mainly because they only have stores in France. Soeur is a clothing store for young girls in their teens, but i thought i would definitely find clothes that actually fit me! and the other was Repetto, the creator of dance inspired shoes. i avoided wearing ballet flats all these years because they always seemed to make my legs look really short and stubby, but not the ones i tried on at Repetto! :D i missed going to a store called Colette because it was closed every time i walked by it, but it's supposed to have all kinds of really cool stuff. another time!
i find myself thinking that a lot about Paris - next time! will we return to Paris? i hope so. i feel like there's just so much to explore. i've just scraped the top of all that's there. but i would also like to visit when there aren't so many tourists. i have nothing against tourists, but they do make the city harder to navigate. :)
since there are so many photos and i couldn't possibly upload all of them here, please go to this link. i'll try to add some more photos from Paris i haven't had a chance to add yet.
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