Day four demanded a small break.  We had been go-go-go since we arrived in Paris, and since it was Thanksgiving Day, we decided to take it a bit easier today.  We slept in, had a leisurely breakfast, and then headed out of the apartment at 1 p.m.

Today, our only plan was the Eiffel Tower, which happens to be in one of the nicest neighborhoods of Paris.  So we thought that area would be a fun place to find a somewhat-Thanksgivingy meal.

We didn’t necessarily find traditional Thanksgiving food, but we did find deliciousness.  Rue Cler is a quaint walking street, full of great cafés, markets, patisseries, and chocolateries.

So Thanksgiving lunch was at Café Central, an adorable little corner café filled with locals and American expats.  I had the best soup I’ve ever had in. my. life.  French onion soup (except there, it’s just “onion soup” — kinda like Chinese food is just “food” in China) with crusty bread at the bottom, amazing broth and sweet onions, and a one inch-thick lid of cheese in a individual tureen.  I finished it, not sure if I could tackle the next course.

I could at least eat a few bites, though.  My cobb salad came, and it had bacon, avacado, and turkey.  There was my Thanksgiving turkey.  All these ingredients are very hard to find where we live, so I was in hog (ha! get it?) heaven.

Kabob had lamb, but it was prepared very differently than it is where we live.  I sampled a bit, and it didn’t taste gamey at all, which is why I usually don’t like lamb.

The kids shared an enormous helping of spaghetti, which was very tasty.  Worth the 9 euros.

(By the way, I’ll interject here and state that I found every French waiter — and almost all French people — extremely friendly and gracious.  I didn’t experience the stereotype at all.  It could be because we were coming from our particular country, and not from the States, where people tend to be friendly in an overkill sort of way.  I’d say France lies somewhere between the States and our current country in terms of friendliness to strangers.  I thoroughly enjoyed the French people.)

Anyway, so after lunch, we wandered and window shopped, and then slowly sauntered to the Eiffel Tower.  This was something I sorta prepared for disappointment, so my expectations were actually exceeded.  Many French find it ugly.  I find it fascinating.

The lines to go up the Tower were outrageous.  We stood in line for what felt like hours, and it was crazy windy.  I prepared myself for some killer weather up top.

We finally got in the elevator and went up to the second level.  You buy tickets to go to the top on the second level, for an additional 5 euros each.  Once we were there, we felt how high we already were.  The views of Paris from there were fantastic, as was the insane wind and rain.  And the crowds.  We stood out on the second floor, took the customary photos and watched the Tower sparkle with Christmas lights, and then headed inside to warmth and crowdedness.

We thought about going to the top, but ultimately decided against it.  At this point, it was night, we were already tired and cold, and felt like it would be more fun if it was just us grownups.  So we got in line to go back down.  We’ll do it next time.

While in line, we chatted with some people from New York behind us (or as Chickpea says, “Yew Nork”).  She became BFFs with their 10-year-old girl, Carrie, and continues to pray for her nightly.

We took the metro back to the apartment, where we Skyped with both sides of our family for two hours.  This meant that the kids were deliriously tired, and eventually passed out at 11 p.m.

It was a fun day, but knew we needed to get good rest for tomorrow’s adventure.

Day three was Museum Day.  And boy, was it.  We left the apartment after breakfast at about 10:30 a.m. and didn’t get back until almost midnight.  The kids were absolutely delirious, but for what all we did, they behaved amazingly.  Garbanzo had no nap (and ultimately had no afternoon nap the entire week, except for a few snoozes in the stroller here and there — nothing longer than an hour).

The first stop was the Musee de l’Air et l’Espace — the Museum of Air and Space.  We saw tons of airplanes, starting from models of the earliest attempts at flight to two modern-day Concordes.

Highlights were seeing the Bleriot, the first plane to cross the English Channel from Paris to London — Chickpea and I are going to read about that in a book for school in a few weeks; biplanes used in World War 1 (complete with the black German cross, made famous by the Red Baron), and getting to walk inside the two Concordes.  I thought the coolest plane was the Dakota, a WW2 fighter plane that would send out parachuting soldiers.

The Air & Space Museum was a few minutes outside town, so we headed back in the rain via bus and went straight to the Musee d’Orsay.  The Orsay was my favorite museum — it picks up where the Louvre ends, showcasing art from the mid 19th century to 1914.  This means it’s mainly impressionist art, heading into art deco and some other bits of modern art.

It was really cool seeing original work by Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Renoir, Cezanne, and Toulouse-Lautrec.  These are some of my favorite artists.  There was also plenty of sculpture.

There was lots of nudity, as is usual in art.  Chickpea found this… interesting, to say the least.  Lots of questions were averted.

After this, we went straight to the Louvre, which was just a few blocks away.  It was already almost 7 p.m., and we were tired and hungry.  The Louvre is actually attached to a mall (weird, I know) with a fancy-schmancy food court.  We ate there, and the kids were getting seriously restless.

By this point, we decided that we could not ask the kids to wander the Louvre with us for hours, after having spent the day at two other museums.

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(Oh, by the way, the reason we did it all in one day was because we got this great deal museum card thingy, where for a set price, you could see like 30 museums.  But we got the one with the shortest amount of time, which meant we had two days to see everything on the card.  It covered the Arc de Triumphe yesterday, and the three museums today.  Anyway, back to the Louvre…)

So per the recommendation of the really good guide book we were going by, we decided to see the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and whatever we could see along the way.  We’ll just have to come back to Paris, either sans kids or when the kids are older.

Yep, the Louvre is huge.  Huge.  Unbelievably huge.  We saw one little speck of it.  The art along the way to our two stops was amazing, so we are really excited about coming back one day to see more.

The Mona Lisa is actually bigger and better than we anticipated, because we’ve heard all our life that it’s really small and kinda unimpressive.  So with low expectations, it’s great.

The Venus de Milo is much bigger than I thought it would be, and was really cool.  I don’t know much about its history, but honestly, there was equally impressive sculpture along the way.  All the sculpture there is really unbelievable — the fact that human beings can carve that kind of intricate work out of rock is mind boggling to me.

We left the Louvre absolutely exhausted, with aching feet and swirling heads.  All four of us were definitely ready for a break.  So we headed to the metro station inside the museum, ready to plop down in a chair and veg for a few minutes before walking the rest of the way home.

But we just managed to walk through the doors to the station to have missed going through the gate to board the train, yet were locked in the opposite direction at just that moment because the Louvre closed.  So in other words, the doors we just went through were locked, and the gate in front of us was locked.

We were trapped with about 20 other people, and the metro people took their sweet time unlocking us.  Apparently, this stop closes earlier than all the other stops because the Louvre closes before the metro does.  But they don’t so much have a plan to make sure all the people get through the metro before the shut the doors.

So 20 minutes later or so, we pass through the metro station, get on a train, and head back to the apartment.  What felt like hours later, we crashed in bed.

On the way home, Chickpea summed up our day perfectly, and quite possibly said the best line of our entire vacation:

“Well, we sure saw a lot of cabooses today.”

That we did, Chick.  That we did.

On Tuesday morning, we had a quick breakfast of eggs, heavenly yogurt, granola, and BACON! (a rare treat for us these days).  So we left the apartment much fuller than we did the day before.  Off to a good start.

We headed immediately to the Arc de Triomphe, the famous arch built by Napoleon to celebrate his glory.  Nazis marched under there during their occupation, and then a grand parade passed through five years later when Paris was set free.  It’s also the setting for the Tour de France grand finale.

I suppose it goes without saying, but the thing is huge.  And intricate.  And impressive.  We went to the top, which had a great view of all of Paris.  It was cold and windy, but it was worth it.

The Arc sits in the center of Paris’ famous 12-spoked roundabout (remember European Vacation?), and one of the spokes is Champs Elysses, the city’s most famous and snobby street.  We spent most of the afternoon strolling down this huge, three mile long street, fighting crowds and the cold.  We window shopped some of the flagship stores of well-known designers, like Chanel, Guerlain, Yves Saint Laurent, Prada, and Armani, just to name a few.  I tried to convince Kabob that he needed a 37,000 euro, diamond-encrusted watch from Cartier, but he felt it was more important that our kids have a fighting chance of attending college.  I guess so.

We bought lunch at a deli and hoped to rest inside a bit, but there were no seats.  So we sat outside on a bench, where the kids let us know that they were not happy.  Chickpea was freezing, Garbanzo didn’t like his lunch, and they were miserable in general.  So we moved on a few feet, and browsed the Disney Store.  For some reason, they were now fine.

The kids played with toys and watched Disney blips while Kabob waited in line for eternity to buy Disneyland tickets.  The store looks pretty much identical to the ones you see in the States, but it’s a treat for our kids.

Oh yes, in between the meltdown and the Disney fun, I popped into a well-known restaurant and bakery called Ladurée.  I took one step inside and knew, yeah, our kids aren’t setting foot in here.  They have a counter adjacent to the dining room where you can buy their most famous specialty, macarons.  They’re not the macaroons we’re used to; the coconut flaked cookies.  These are coconut wafers sandwiched with a flavored ganache and then dipped in some sugary, delicious concoction.  You can choose from a myriad of gift boxes and sizes, so I bought a little black box with eight mini macarons.

So after the Disney store, we popped into this little bakery and ordered hot chocolate, coffee, a few croissants and pastries, and cracked open the macarons.  Heavenly.

We continued down the street, which eventually morphed into a seasonal Christmas craft show of sorts, with little white wooden booths shaped like old-fashioned houses.  They had everything from giant chocolate-covered marshmallows to Russian caviar to pashminas from Iran.

These booths went on for ages, on either side of the street.  Finally at the end, we were at the Place de la Concorde, a garden and giant obelisk from Egypt, surrounded by beautiful buildings (of course).  But most importantly, it is home to an enormous ferris wheel.

We coughed up the 25 euro for our family to ride, and we were glad we did.  It’s a slow-moving ferris wheel with fully-enclosed cars, complete with heaters and a radio.  It rotated five times, giving us excellent views of the Louvre, the Arc, and lots of other famous buildings that we know are important but which we can’t identify.  The kids loved it.

Having finished Champs Elysses in one piece, we went after one more thing — Le Bon Marche.  Normally we wouldn’t care to go out of our way to see the world’s first department store, but we read that it has a great toy store inside, along with a fabulous food department selling great edible souvenirs.  So we took a quick metro ride to the store, which is just behind a cute little playground with equipment made for kids our size.  We let them play with the French kids for a good 30 minutes.  The kids all seemed very sweet, which I think Chickpea enjoyed.  Where we live, the kids can be a bit more aggressive than we’re used to, so these kids’ style of play was more her style.

We finally made it inside Le Bon Marche, and making a quick circle of the perfume and accessories section, where Chickpea managed to hop and slip into a display, cutting her chin, we made a beeline for the toy department.  I didn’t want her bleeding on any 300 euro Hermes scarves.

The toy department was indeed wonderful, full of sweet little wooden French toys, like play kitchens, food, riding cars, train sets, and dollhouses.  We were probably in there a good hour, and we managed to distract the kids long enough to buy Garbanzo his first set of Lego for his upcoming birthday.  Lego are insanely overpriced where we live — like $50 for a small kit — so 21 euros for 650 pieces was livable.

Onto the food department, which is actually across the street.  It felt like shopping at Central Market in Austin.  It was mostly French food (duh), but they had different international sections with Mexican, Italian, and Asian foods.  The aisle labeled “Etas Unis” had marshmallow fluff, boxed macaroni and cheese, Oreos, and Dr. Pepper.  We picked up two cans of Dr. Pepper and a box of mac and cheese (or as Chick now calls it, “mac and fromage”).  It’s vacation, we decided.  We’ll let the kids eat freakishly yellow processed cheese.

We were exhausted and famished by this time, so we made a beeline for the metro to head home.  The journey back was stress-free but long.  So when we finally walked in to the apartment, we collapsed.  We mustered up enough energy to make the kids’ mac and cheese, and to throw together a salad for us grownups (no powdered cheese, thank you).  We threw the customary brie and bread on the side, and it was a great dinner.

And like the night before, we had grand ambitions of watching a movie on the computer once the kids were down, but as soon as we were horizontal, we knew it was wishful thinking.  We all crashed at the same time.  I have no idea what time it was.