Day 2 in Paris - Lots of walking

Got up late after some collective sleeping in catching up from the jet lag still. We left the hotel around 10am and walked over to the nearby Cluny museum to see the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries and to buy our 4-day "go to the head of the line" museum passes. We zipped through the Cluny enjoying its very nice antiquities and then perused the gift shop (required when shopping with the Tan family). Next we were lucky to stumble into the same store that sells kouign amman pastries we had in Bourdeaux, so we had to try a few. They were nice, but we were pleased and excited to note that we enjoyed our local kouign amman even more - from Frank Sally's local (Berkeley) bakery, La Fournee, which is a few blocks from where we live.

Then we headed off in the direction of the Louvre musuem and found large (but likely not summer-sized) lines there; we zipped right in with our museum passes. We headed to the Marly and Puget courts and marveled at the wonderful dappled light and the superb sculptures there after having a Louvre lunch ordered by Livy delivered our in bien French. (He was suitably impressed and made a nice but brief fuss over it.) Next we head to the Winged Victory sculpture but it was being restored until summer 2014 so we missed out on that, but there is lots more to see. We headed over for Livy to see the Mona Lisa painting and got to the room where it was mobbed by at least 200 people, all crowding to get up close with cell phones raised high in the air. It was funny to see so many people vying to see this one painting, considering all the riches in the Louvre. (Maybe kind of like the way people line up to get the latest iPhone. Note that Chet does not do that despite whatever you may think. Haa haa)

So we finally ditched the Louvre and headed North to the Tuilieries garden where at least 3 sweet looking gypsy girls asked Livy if she "spoke inglese" but we had already mentioned to her to not respond to these query's for whatever purpose they had in mind. Someone else she stood out as the "most American" looking. We think it was the clothes.

Our next destination was the Orangerie to see the Monet's oil paintings of the water lily's in his pond in Giverney which were spectacular as usual for this quick visit to this museum. We weren't in a hurry but made it out of there in a half an hour thanks to the museum pass and ditched the line again. No photos allowed in this place either. God only knows why as if you don't use a flash then who would really care. My guestimate is that 1/3 of the museums here don't allow any photography.

So we felt we had to stop and get Café Créme  (that is espresso ) on the Champs d'Elysées street with all the glitz and glamour that is there.. Liv tried her Créme but pronounced it to be un-drinkable after adding all her sugar so Chet finished it for her.. We then marched on to the Arc de Triumph after Liang nearly re-sprained her ankle on the hard streets of Paris. We hiked to the Arch and decided to go up to the top and found the views to be very nice. (Again the museum pass took us to the front of the line and likely saved us 20 minutes.)

The photo above was of a veteran at the Arc de Triumph.  We hopped on the metro train and got back down to the Saint Germain area (pronounced San German) and found the restaurant we wanted to go to Cafe du Metro was packed to the gills with World Cup revelers and so we went across the street to a plan B location and the food was good but not great. We were entertained though by the people outside and inside screaming at their excitement about France winning the game and then after the game the horns going off because mother France had won!  There were people with flags coming out of their cars honking their horns and the partying went on well after midnight keeping us up later than we planned despite how tired we were and all the stairs we hd to take to get up to our 6th floor room-ette.