Ah, Paris

Wednesday

We landed at 6:30 am, were not asked any questions at Customs and made it out of the airport and into town via the RER and the metro in pretty much record time.  But although we found our AirBnB address we couldn’t manage to contact our host to get the key!  Jake had made the arrangements so I tried, hard, really, to stay out of it.  And by 12:00 we did have our key instructions.  So, what did we do in the meanwhile?  One, expresso and pastries sitting outside our corner patisserie.  Two, find an alternate lodging possibility which also allowed us to leave our luggage while we walked around.  Three, gee, look honey, there’s the Natural History Museum right over there through the Jardin du Plants!  Jake was in an agreeable (or just was it just acquiescence due to exhaustion?) mood so we got tickets to the Evolution Exposition Hall. 

The Hall of Evolution - see better photos on Facebook

I think I missed this fable when I was young

The formal section of the Jardin du Plants

The Evolution Hall, formerly just the hall for fish and birds, is a modernized display of taxidermy.  It’s a marvelous building with floors of balconies backed with large windows and a huge central display area.  Many evolutionary themes and museum topics are covered including what is a species, how have people influenced evolution, taxonomy, methods of preserving specimens, and huge displays of species that occur in similar ecological regions.  There are very few signs in English and the computer touch screens didn’t seem to work very well. 

Our first lunch in town was at a place near the Gare de Austerlitz and consisted of chicken and vegetable lasagna for me and a glass of Bordeaux and onion soup for Jake.  Not bad, not remarkable.  It was a decent place for people watching though.  Lots of people that were coming from the park and from the train station.  A little boy holding a fistful of London huge plane tree leaves sat at an outdoor table with his mom.  Another somewhat rough looking middle aged couple sat with their silky little dog at another table.  During lunch we figured out how to get the keys to our apartment, so we finally got in, retrieved our luggage, showered and took a nice nap!

The view from our apartment - facing an interior square

Lovers along the Seine

In the afternoon we took a long walk through the Latin Quarter where our apartment is located.  This quarter has several schools including the Sorbonne, some medieval ruins, and lots of 1880s buildings.  Our apartment is on the fifth floor of one of these buildings and has been modernized fairly recently.  I love the tiny appliances so often encountered in European apartments.  There is a 3’ wide x 6’ tall refrigerator that fits neatly against an angled wall in the little kitchen area.  There’s even a narrow under the counter dishwasher made to look like another cabinet.  The bathroom is beautifully tiled in whites and beiges with a narrow tower like 100 liter water heater separating the toilet from the small washer.  The vessel sink sits on a small wooden shelf and cabinets are tucked into little spaces for storage.  The windows have window boxes of geraniums and succulents.  I’m wondering how they got the short but plump leather sofa into the apartment – it would not fit in the tiny elevator that Jake and I barely fit into so it must have come up the 6 flights of stairs that have a curve on every floor!

On our walk we passed one of the many street markets Paris is famous for.  Jake bought a scarf so he can better look like a Frenchman.  Before deciding on the purchase we sat at a café outdoor table with a glass of rose, chamomile tea and smoked salmon with blinis and observed men’s fashion (and women’s too, but we were focused on how men wear their scarves).  Other items for sale included cheeses, sausages, escargot and sautéed mushrooms, jewelry, highly varnished wooden boxes, and various sorts of handmade clothing.

We barely were able to rouse ourselves to go out again for dinner, but we did and had a tasty bowl of Vietnamese soup in a lively square uphill from our apartment.