Day le first, continued.

In a Banana first, I've managed to get quite a few photos edited and uploaded in the first two days after coming home from Paris.  Now, keep in mind that I took roughly a squillion photos during the trip.  Having "quite a few" done means got about an eighth of the photos done.  For me, that's a lot.

The first of very, very many cafe cremes that we had in Paris.

This was the very first thing we saw.  We took the metro from the airport and our stop was just outside of the Notre Dame. 

Pretty spectacular, right?  No photos we took did justice to the beauty and awe-inspiring majesty of the place.  Also, J almost knocked down a wall dividing the tourists from the people worshiping in the rows.

This guy is pretty gruesome.  I think it might be Saint Denis.  I bought a book (at Shakespeare and Company!  I was there!  I shopped !) called Paris: A Secret History.  Pretty fascinating read, lots of weird and cool stories about the history of the City Of Lights.   The point being that's where I read the story of Saint Denis.  Which is also on Wikepedia.  Ah- when I went to the Wiki page, I saw a photo of this statue.  So there.  It's confirmed.  St. Denis.

The aforementioned Shakespeare and Company.  AKA The Awesomest Place In The History Of Ever. 

This was the spectacular view from our hotel balcony.  We stayed at the Hotel Cardinal and it was pretty great.  There were a couple of things that went wrong during our stay (the wallpaper peeled off in a massive piece near the window, the window in the shower broke right off the hinges, The Kid slept in a red sweater and now his sheets, they are pink) but they seemed to be cool about it.  Kind of hard to tell, really.  My French is not so good.   I'm just going to assume that they're used to problems with the buildings.  After all, most of them (the buildings, not the people) are well over a hundred years old.   Also, there was a bidet (not pictured).

And that's the first day.  Odds are good, given my bloggy history, that I won't mention the trip anymore after this.  Hopefully, though, I'll get more in here.  There are some great stories from Paris.

Day le first.

Jet lag has struck and I'm lying in a hotel bed in Paris at two in the morning listening to the sound of a night winding down. There's a cafe across the street from the hotel and it's been a good evening for them.
We got in at 8 in the morning and instead of sleeping on the plane, I thought it would be fun to watch 3 movies. We got to our hotel at 9am, we'd been awake for roughly twenty hours, and we were told that we couldn't check in until two. Five hours of more not sleeping. I was fine with this. I've got YEARS of not getting any sleep, what with nighttime jobs and daytime relationships. I dragged an exhausted husband and a nearly comatose child out into the streets and we went to Notre Dame and then Shakespeare and Co. That bookstore was a dream come true. I hadn't seen it when I'd been to Paris before and that's a good thing - without a family to answer to, I would have just moved right in. The bookstore is large but you'd never know it because there are so many twists and turns and little nooks to explore. The Kid wedged himself into a kind of cabinet with two typewriters inside and as I browsed upstairs, I could hear him clacking away on the typewriter keys. ALL the new books downstairs, lovely, dusty old books upstairs, with little cots scattered here and there. I met someone once who said they'd lived in the children's book section for a little while. That must have been amazing. It's my idea of a perfect world. If anything ever happens to J, I'm going to pack right up and move into the bookstore.