Paris Day 2 and 3

Day 2: Musée des Arts et Métiers, Robot Parade

Since I had a recently read Foucault’s Pendulum and am a big ol’ technology nerd, we checked out the Musée des Arts et Métiers. We had a very nice brunch down the street beforehand, and Miles woke up just in time to terrorize the museum. He knows what a touch screen is from his frequent jaunts to the Museum of Natural History with Grandpa John, and no locomotive, no steam-powered omnibus from the turn of the century, not even a moon-explorer robot could stop him in his quest to find the next ‘ta scee’. So that made the museum an athletic as well as a historical experience.

The church with the actual pendulum and the active model one is way cool.

We walked on down to the Pompadou Center and there was some kind of crazy cardboard robot parade (political?) going on outside with a brass band. They were shooting off confetti and flares, and we all thought it was neat, especially Miles, until it it got ‘too lou’. He’s told us about it a few times now: ‘Robot Paray. Throw paper. Too lou.’

So we checked out the Stravinsky fountain, hung out at a playground, and went for some tasty gallettes at Breizh Cafe.

Day 3: Le Louvre, Notre Dame

We went to the Tuileries in the morning for some park time and a nice coffee outdoors. They had another cool carousel, and we tried that. Miles does not like carousels yet, it turns out. We had accidentally left all of the diapers at home, but Lizzie made a brave foray to find some more.

Thus armed, we headed for the Louvre, just as Miles was settling down for a nap. Now this is one enormous museum, and it’s true, you DO get to skip the lines if you have a stroller. As we live walking distance from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I have to say that while the Louvre’s collection is definitely more impressive, I was mostly there for the building itself, and was not disappointed at all. Miles seemed to agree; once he woke up, he was pretty done with the museum, except that there was a major construction project in one of the courtyards (right out the window beside the most famous painting in the world), with three excavators, a skid steer, and a dump truck all working AT THE SAME TIME. This was pretty much Miles’s dream, so we stayed there for a while and watched.

Then we took a nice walk along the Seine to Notre Dame, checked out the cathedral, and headed ‘er on back to the apartment, as Miles was out of sorts. He threw up when we got home, and was hot, so it seems possible he has a stomach bug. He’s old enough to be a little bit distressed about it for a while after (‘Throw up! Miles throw up. Daddy clean.’), but snapped out of it and got back to Legos pretty quick.

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-Brett