Paris in Springtime! Wednesday

Wednesday was a lot of exploring parks and and the not quite as famous touristy places. We started out having brunch at a little restaurant right on the Seine (although the walls along the river are too tall and we couldn't actually see the Seine. It was good, but they tricked us- they advertised a lunch deal, but then they charged me over 7 euros for a "medium" glass of apple juice!! Bah!

We wandered over to the Latin Quarter because it sounded intriguing when our tour guide on the boat tour talked about it. There we found a little restaurant district, and we decided to come back that evening for dinner. We also found a Canadian book store- one of those wonderful little places where books are EVERYWHERE- lining every wall and stacked up on every available shelf or table or floor. It was lovely to find a place with so many books in ENGLISH!

We then walked over to explore the Jardin de Luxembourg, which is a beautiful park which is actually the Palais Luxembourg grounds. After that we took the metro over to where the botanical gardens are. We decided not to go in, however, because you needed to pay for that, of course, and figured we could just walk over the the Seine where we knew there was a park with lots of modern art scattered about. After having a hard time actually getting over there because the botanical gardens and a bunch of buildings were blocking any direct route, we sat on the bank of the Seine and watched all the tour boats and restaurant boats go by.

Then, Rene decided to fulfil his burning desire to experience the amazing architecture of the Centre Pompidou! I had no idea what it was, but I never would have guessed that it looks like it does! Rene thinks it's WONDERFUL, but I think it looks like a three old got a hold of some plumbing pipes and crayola finger paint and piled it all on top of each other! In any case, it's definitely a very interesting museum/performing center/tribute to high-tech architecture.

It was there that I first experience the free public toilets that are scattered around Paris. They look kind of like silver metal phone booths. However, what happens is after you come out of the booth, the door closes and locks, and the next person has to wait about 2 minutes while the booth self-dissenfects! Then once it's done, the little indicator turns green and the next person can go in. It was a very interesting experience once I figured out how it works (the directions in French weren't any help at all).

We then went to the Galeries Lafayette, which is kind of like a big Macy's. We didn't really look around because everything looked really expensive, so we walked over to the opera house there. Of course we only saw that from the outside too- I looked to see if there were any good operas while we were there but there weren't any- oh sadness.

Next we went back to the Latin Quarter to have dinner at a cute little french bistro that had a three course dinner prix fixe for 10 euros a person!! Yippee for cheap! However, the food was just . . . eh . . .

And then it was time to head back to the hotel for the end of our second day in Paris . . .