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TRAVEL BLOG ENTRY
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We arrived to Helen and Vlad's home with an intention of hanging out with them and also to get to know their kids, Michael's nephews, better. Oban is 4 and Malcolm is only 1.5 years old, but for their cunning and mischievousness they might be re-incarnations of Sun Tzu. We fended off frequent escape attempts through the front gate, as well as from battering each other in. In a misguided attempt at bringing some Trinidadian culture to the house, we brought a child's steel pan for the boys to learn. Quickly, it was decided that the best storage place for this pan drum was high up on the refrigerator. Michael, trying to assuage the ears of the grownups, dampened the sticks with a piece of cork.
We spent a good bit of the day playing with the young boys, and then it was time for baths and bedtime stories. They were delightful, and we are more fit for the running and crawling we did, as well as the trips to the parks.
We did make it out of the house once in a while to eat oysters with Jean at Suffren, visit with Cuau and Louise, lunch and hang out with Clea, and to get some culture in the city. The Musee du Quai Branly was a hit. The exhibits are of aboriginal cultures from around the world. The first group covered was Papua New Guinea, which sets the tone for the rest of the museum: masks made out of thick spiderwebs, skulls, and shrunken heads... It was a very flashy modern museum, although a bit show-offish.
We even caught some of the mime festival in the Jardin du Luxembourg - what trip to Paris is complete without some mimes?! And of course we strolled the jardin and saw old men playing petanque, old men playing chess, young kids riding ponies, teenagers smooching on the grass (Pelouse Interdit!), bees busy in the bee hives, art stidents drawing the sculptures and scenery, as well as a cyclops in the Medici fountain.
We spent the better part of a day in the Musee Rodin and the garden, both of which are always wonderful. An afternoon was dedicated to Michael's old haunt, the Pere Lachaise necropolis. It was a great stroll amongst some beautiful sculptures. Some of the graves that we sought out and paid homage to the inhabitants: Abelard and Heloise, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Modigliani and Jean Hebuterne, Edith Piaf, Victor Noir (duelist/journalist), Croce-Spinelli and Sivel (baloonists - there's a great bronze cast of them holding hands after asphyxiation), Gustave Dore, Colette, Sarah Bernhardt, and Jim Morrison. Some of the graves we stumbled on by accident were: Lakanal, Honore de Balzac (with a Rodin bust for his head piece), Haussmann, and a Schlumberger (a chemist, possibly a distant cousin of Marcel and Conrad?)
On the 30th, we ate a lovely lunch at the Suffren for our 2nd anniversary, Erin had a big pot of Moules and Michael had oysters and steak tartare.
Near the end of our stay in Paris, we had the thought that we were getting old, and losing touch with our youth and so we went out to a bar in the Bastille. Sitting with the other patrons in Le Feu de l'Enfer, we felt out of place though, neither of us wore enough black, no leather, no facial piercings, not enough tattoos... Although refreshing, it did not make us feel younger.
We did appreciate the chance to unwind at Helen and Vlad's and it was good for us to catch up.
previous travel blog entry
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