Day Two: 23 Aug. 2002

Slept til 9, then went to Samaritaine's terrace for breakfast. We sit in the southwest corner, looking towards the Eiffel tower. Youart Peche, a Croque Monsieur for K, Pain au Chocolate for me. Mmm. We take a few pictures, K feeds some sparrows. Feels like we can see everything from here: Notre Dame, the Pompideau Centre, the Louvre, Sacre Couer, the Musee Dorsay, Les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe and the much-larger Arc de la Defense aligned with it, the Eiffel Tower of course, even our tiny street. We write a few postcards. K and I discover that I neglected to include some crucial addresses on my list. Dang. Maybe we can find an internet cafe somewhere later.

We take the stairs and the ascendeur to the ground floor of Samaritaine to shop for an air-freshening candle for our room, and some sunblock. Drop things at the hotel. Go around the corner to the Tabac for timbres, put them on the postcards as we walked past the Louvre to the Banque de France to change our Francs (from last year) into Euros. Have to ask skinny, scowling, smoking, black-clad French guy for help in finding banque. Get there, go through security that rivaled American airport security. As usual, I'm carrying tons of metal, and have trouble getting through. Inside, we're directed to take a number and wait on marble benches while 50 people are helped by 3 tellers. The room is huge, echoey, and artificially lit. Feels like a rare little taste of mundane Parisian life.

K ducks out to look for a public toilette - the banque did not have one - and finds them less than inspiring. They're apparently built to be incredibly efficient at self-cleaning, rather than user-friendly. At least the banque didn't charge us much for exchanging our Francs.

Afterwards, we walk south and east, into the Palais Royale for a shady seat on a bench under two rows of poplars in the Jardins. I take pictures of her running between the columns, Charade-style.

We inquire at the Louvre about Carte-Musées, and they direct us to the nearby Metro, where we also buy a carnet of Metro tickets. We sit in the square between the Louvre and the Palais Royale and rip through the plastic of our individually-wrapped Cartes-Musées, to look at the handy folded-up Musée list inside. We decide to turn around and spend some time at the Louvre. (Because we enter on the north side, we don't see the infamous Pyramide until we're underneath it.) We start in the Stussy section and head for the paintings, stopping on the way to see some stunning Greek sculpture. I'm impressed by the ceilings in the ground-floor rooms. We make our way down a seemingly infinite hallway full of classic works, playing our usual game: looking for familiar faces. One figure off to the side of a Madonna and child looks suspiciously like Kathryn's sister Joyce during her teenage years. Another young woman looks like our little friend Isabel, all grown up. We voluntarily get swept into the flow of those lining up for the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa has been moved into a room of its own, with a new, less-glary window in front of it. We see dozens of people squirm to the front of the crowd, take a flash picture, and leave. They've "acquired" the Mona Lisa now - why look at it anymore? On the way back down the great hall we ponder the painting's popularity. It's beautiful but it certainly doesn't seem "better" than everything else in the Louvre. Kathryn and I work our way through the crowds surrounding Winged Victory, look through the 17th and 18th-century paintings, and then find David's work on the Rez de Chausée. Wow.

We've worn our feet to nubs. We have a tarte au pomme at the restaurant in the Entry level (under the Pyramide) and rest. We take the escalators up and out, towards the Arc du Carousel (through which we can see the perfectly-aligned Arc de Triomph), and then towards the Seine. We consider taking a taxi or Metro to our restaurant on the Ile de la Cité, but it's too near. We walk across Pont Double.

It's after 7 when we arrive at Au Vieux Paris. We sit outside, with a lovely view down one of IDLC's narrowest streets, and have the porc and la poulet, incredible cold tomato-basil soup, and herbed crepes. The waiter has been to America many times, and speaks very good English. Kathryn tells him it's our anniversary de marriage, and he says he has a surprise for us. He gives us bowls of painfully sweet berries, with a candle stuck in mine, and sings "Appy Bursday!" to me. Oops! Very sweet. As I pay the bill, a functionaire at the next table strikes up a conversation with Kathryn, starting by telling her she is beautiful. They have a charming French conversation, and I understand bits and pieces of it, monitoring as carefully as I can for further pickup lines. As we leave, he asks when we'll be dining there again. We smile and shake our heads. Who knows what we'll do tomorrow?

On to Day Three