Day 3 - the louvre

Oh what grand plans we had for today. Early rise and walk to the Louvre to be there when it opens at 9:00. The first Sunday of every month, most of the museums in Paris are free. So on an overcast Sunday AM, the streets of Paris were relatively deserted. The zillions of cars were all parked, and the buzzing of mopeds was conspicuously absent. We et a pretty brisk pace and within a few minutes we were both hungry and I was wanting coffee.

We had woken up early (4:30am) again and fell back asleep around 6-ish. We both felt like we could not get out of bed. But we had our grand plan, and we had better stick to it.

No café open in sight, I tell you Tim Hortons would friggin clean up over here. Most of the sidewallk vendor coffee comes from a Nescafe cappucino dispenser (haute cuisine). I didn't give a flying fling flang jang if it was dispensed from a donkey's backside, I needed my caffeine. Across the seine, pres de place de concorde there was a crepe stand and we both ha a crepe avec fraises (thin pancake with strawberry jam) and COFFEE for moi.

We were on the opposite end of a large jardin (garden, park) from the Louvre and sat at a fountain and ate our crepes. We finally moved on to the Louvre to discover that about 20,000 people had the same clever plan as us (la meme plan brilliant chez nous). We actually ended up getting escorted wth a bunch of other people to an alternate entrance and were inside pretty quickly.

Imagine you're at Safeway and all you need is a an of baked beans and a carton of milk. You could look at every piece of produce on the way and inspect every jar of pickles for colour and clarity, or you can make a bee-line for the beans and the milk. The Mona Lisa was our beans, and the Venus de Milo was our milk. You can't really take pictures in a lot of the Louvre, which didn't seem to stop some tourists! So my snaps are the outside of the Louvre, if you want to see a picture of any piece in the Louvre, apparently http://www.louvre.fr/ or something like that has pics of everything. You really have to see this place.

Honestly we didn’t spent much time at all inside, the place was crowing quickly and we both were starting the fatigue. We had a pleasant walk back through the backstreets of Paris, and retired to our room for a nap.

After a nap we headed out to our fave boulangerie on Rue St Dominique and picked up some food and drinks for a picnic. We walked the Champs de Mars (park surrounding the Eiffel Tower and back to the park on the other sie of the Siene where we had pcinic'd the day previous. Today was the finals for the LG Extreme Sport World Tour and there was a skateboard, inline skate and freestyle bmx going on. We ate and watched for awhile in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower as storm clouds began to gather.

We had finished eating, and at the first few drops of rain were on our way back up the Champs de Mars. The clouds started to break a little, so we stopped at the café Champs de Mars which is a typical corner café made for posing and people watching. We did a little of both and enjoyed a cool drink before heading off to our boulanger for a baguette to take back to the room. The epicerie across the street is a good place to pick up a few cold beer and a bottle of wine, as we have found on a few occasions…

We both love Paris and can definitely see coming back and spending more time here. We both are anxious to get moving and seeing the country side and experiencing the different coasts.