Je t'aime Paris
We started our day in the most appropriate way while in Paris and that was with a trip to the bakery. It was an extremely hot day but with such limited time in Paris we had to fight on.
Again we headed over to Notre Dame to see how long the line for the towers was and again it was unmanageable. While we were in that area, however, we heard a New Europe tour guide talk about Ile St. Louis, which is the island north of Notre Dame and its fantastic ice cream. Grace is very food oriented and so our goal for the day turned into getting Grace some delicious ice cream.
The Ile St. Louis is a really cute place and we had a great time exploring it. There are a lot of little restaurants there and we chose venture back for dinner. While we were walking in the Paris heat we stopped for some ice cream, which was nothing special, but then we found a small produce store. There was nothing really special about the store itself but there was a juicer inside that made the best orange juice (at least we suspect it was orange juice). Perfect beverage for such a hot day.
One of the things that I told Grace that she had to see while in Paris was the Louvre. It has so many great works of art and I knew that she might regret it if she didn't at least see the Mona Lisa. We started walking over to the Louvre but when we got there we discovered that is was closed. I guess we were just going to have to come back the next day.
We took the metro (mastering public transportation was one of our skills) back to our hostel and napped before dinner. It was also necessary to shower before dinner because we were sticky from the Parisian sun.
As I mentioned we had decide to travel back to Ile St. Louis for dinner. One of my father's requests was that Grace and I have a nice authentic French dinner while in Paris so we found a very tiny restaurant (only six tables) that looked like it had not changed for about 150 years that seemed like it would fit the bill.
We got as table and were the only ones in the restaurant (although eventually another party came) and the chef came over and took our orders. There was also a cat walking around the restaurant and I was overjoyed that we found such a great "hole in the wall" place, although I desperately hoped it didn't cough up a hair ball.
The highlights of dinner were definitely Grace's dishes. She got both French onion soup, which was the best that I've ever had, and duck confit, which was also very good. I got steak au poive and it wasn't much to write home about, mostly because the meat was just not great quality.
After dinner we went in search of dessert and ended up getting gelato, which was very good. It then started drizzling but I was determined to show Grace the Arc du Triomphe so we headed in that direction. Unfortunately, but the time we got there it was full on raining and after getting a glimpse we went back to the hostel.
One nice thing about where we were staying was that they had free internet and I had my computer with me. They also had computer available for use in the lobby so Grace and I could keep up on our emails and correspondence. We would upload pictures, write email, and check Facebook, then turn in for the night.
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