Paris, Day 2

Breakfast today was fabulous. Fresh croissants (plain, chocolate, and the best almond ones we've ever tasted), baguette, wonderful fresh fruit, coffee, and tea. And more of those little puffs that the kids liked so much.

After breakfast, we walked through the Tuileries Gardens:



on the way to the Musée de l'Orangerie (home of Monet's Water Lilies):




This was a nice change from the Roman and Greek sculptures we've been seeing recently. The first floor was dedicated to the Water Lilies, and the lower floor had an interesting collection of more modern art (Impressionist, Cubist, etc.). I liked the Renoirs a lot, and Beth and I both enjoyed Marie Laurencin's paintings.

For lunch, we walked down Rue Cler and picked up a variety of things for a picnic. Matt had a salmon & spinach quiche, Beth a quiche Lorraine, I had a feuilletine (layered pastry with ham and bechamel), and John had a chicken sandwich. We ate at a little park just outside the Army Museum. Everything was delicious, and we finished up with some currants and wild strawberries:





Next stop was Napoleon's Tomb and the Army Museum, housed in the Hôtel des Invalides:





As usual, there was a long line for the ladies room, and just like yesterday at the train station, it turned out that only one of the stalls was available--the rest were locked.

After the tomb, we went to the Arms and Armor section of the museum. The armor was fabulous, but it was all housed in glass cases with too many random reflections to take good photos. They had an entire armory in one section, with row upon row of armor and weapons.



Beth and I had had enough of the Army Museum by this time (which we had predicted), so we left John and Matt there and took off for Le Carrousel du Louvre, the mall under the Louvre Museum. We were rather disappointed at what we found--only one small clothing store, a nature store, and a bunch of jewelry and whatnots. Oh, we did come across the Apple Store, which had free wireless, so I checked my mail there. Still haven't been able to upload the last four blogs, but I hope tomorrow morning we'll be successful! (Our hostess is having Internet problems, and hasn't been able to get online either.)

We stopped for our customary afternoon ice cream on the way home. I had peach today, and Beth had peach and pear.

For dinner, we went to L'Ebouillanté, just across the river on the Right Bank. We had delicious crepes (Les Bricks). John had egg, gruyere, tomato, and ham:



Matt had egg, tomato, gruyere, onions, chevre, creme, and coriander:



Beth had eggs, fromage blanc, sweet peppers, onions, and parsley:



and I had egg, tuna, tomato, sweet peppers, onions, olives and capers (okay, I picked off the capers, but the rest was delicious):



For dessert, we had chocolate gateau (John):



tarte tatin with caramel (Matt):



crumble with apricots and red berries (Beth):



and cake with cinnamon and walnuts:



The sunset was lovely on the way back to the apartment:



John and I tried to go to the internet cafe nearby, but discovered it had closed at 8:00 pm. We'll try again in the morning, so you can read this!