The Paris of my youth

The last time I was in Paris was 1994, and Phil and I were in France for a month, and Paris for a few days. Three years before that, I spent 6 weeks in Paris. Before there were cell phones, I got here, found a youth hostel, enrolled myself in language lessons, found a sublet, negotiated it in French, and generally found my way around Paris by myself.

Today, I felt like Rip Van Winkle. The city mostly looks the same, but it isn't. Much of my logistical knowledge was useless. I had no idea that the existence of online tickets means that you HAVE to buy online tickets. Or that there are so many more visitors to Paris now that they sell out in advance. Even our relatively recent experiences in Greece had not prepared us for this...we rolled up to the Parthenon and got 20 tickets whatever day we wanted. So we are learning all over again.

We got our morning pain au chocolat, took the Metro to the Seine, got on our bato-bus, cruised to the Musee D'Orsay, and realized that tickets were sold out for the day. So we continued on to the Eiffel Tower and Ellie got to see it (,close up, but from below) while I wrestled with multiple third party sellers until I found one that had tickets available. Bottom line: we saw the museum, and it was amazing, but the experience was humbling. I thought I was an experienced European traveler. So now we have advance tickets for the Louvre and will get ones for the Loire chateaux. We hope that outside of Paris there is room for more spontaneity! We leave Paris tomorrow night for Rouen.

Paris is ready for the Olympics
The guns are larger than the last time I was here, but the modes of police transport are also different..note the skates. Is this just for the Olympics?

Thank goodness the food is the same, fresh and delicious. We have not had a disappointing meal yet.
Looking forward to seeing this in person in a couple of days!
And this one!

At the top of the museum...which used to be a train station.
A train station that had a party room!

And a little Lady Liberty.

on the way home we passed a pirate party with a pinyata in a courtyard.
We had dinner in a little cafe in St Germain de Pres, some gourmet ice cream, and then we went home to enjoy our Airbnb.

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