Paris – Day 15

We get up late today and it’s drizzling outside. We decide the first thing we are going to do is head over to the other side of Notre Dame and get ourselves a crepe. We start wandering and the rain is getting a little heavier. Not too heavy but enough that we constantly need the umbrellas up. The two crappy umbrellas we bought in London are not cutting it so we stop and buy a couple of new ones. As if we didn’t look enough like tourists we are now poncing around with umbrellas with “Paris” written all over them. We finally make it to a window I am certain is where we got our crepes from when we were here last time and order four. We start chowing down while we are walking and we turn the corner and.....ahhh, that wasn’t the place, this is the place, bugger. The crepes we were eating were pretty ordinary and we all felt a bit crook afterwards so we won’t make that mistake again. The rain is relentless and shows no sign of easing up, our shoes are soaked and we need to find some raincoats. Tyler has a Celtic jacket he bought in Glasgow that’s working fine for him but the rest of us are struggling. We eventually find one for Mia but we can’t find one for Kris or me, or at least ones that don’t cost an arm and a leg or ones that make us look like dorks......ok, bigger dorks. So we give up and put up with the rain. We head back to the apartment for lunch and after that decide to continue on. It’s still raining as we walk and we find ourselves walking behind the Notre Dame church where there is a heap of small birds being fed by some bloke straight out of his hand. He motions to Mia to come and grab the bread from him so Mia does. All of a sudden this big fat pigeon fly’s up and sits on Mia’s arm and starts eating the bread. He was having a good old time eating from Mia’s hand but I think Mia was expecting the little cute ones would be there instead. We continue walking and we start a walk that will take us through the Place des Vosges and through the Jewish district. The Place des Vosges is amazing with the magnificent garden in the centre. We walk around in the garden for a while, in the rain, and continue on under the covered area of the buildings. We come across a trio playing Latin type music and hang around to watch. We end up buying the CD because the music was awesome. We keep walking making our way to the Jewish district and Rue des Rosiers. This is meant to be a very famous area and is always full of people. We get there and it is quiet, quiet as in dead, no one here, ghost town. Then it dawns on me, I read somewhere that there is one day in the week they don’t operate due to religion or something like that. We assume it must be Saturday. We head back to the apartment stocking up on bread, groceries fruit and veg along the way and we also grab a couple of bottles of wine. We get home and prepare dinner, open the wine and......no wine glasses. We can’t drink wine without wine glasses so I say to Kris that I’ll go over the road and see if they sell them in the supermarket. They didn’t but the wine shop next door did. Ha, 8 o’clock on a Saturday night and we can buy wine glasses over the road, this place is awesome. So we finish up the day with another bread and salad feast and a few glasses of wine while listening to the CD we had just bought. What a great to finish a day in Paris (except the CD ended up being crap).

Mia feeding the pigeon

The pigeon thinks he can take a better photo

Mia and Tyler in the rain near the Seine

Walking through Place des Vosges