Paris Part 4: Friday

Callie had another rough night. It seems her teething is in full effect. She was waking up every 1/2 hour to an hour. She also was very gassy, so we tried giving her some gripe water and it helped a bit although she was quite perplexed by the sensation that ginger, water and fennel provided. I was soooo close to getting her to sleep and it looked like it was going to be a sound sleep around 7am as Bill was getting ready to go to work, when all of a sudden the alarm clock started blaring. Curses! I was pretty darn close to just ripping it out of the wall and tossing it across the room. But of course I didn't. I had to turn on the light to figure out how to turn it off. As a result, Baby Girl was wide awake. I finally gave up around 11:30am, even though I had only gotten a grand total of 3 hours of sleep. We decided to take it easy because I was feeling pretty ill. You know how when you haven't slept enough that you feel like you're going to puke? That's where I was. No fun.
So Mom, Callie and I set out for a mellow day. I was determined to make sure that my mom saw Notre Dame before she left Paris. We loaded up the stroller into the elevator. Mom noticed that there was only a down arrow on the elevator on our floor even though there are 6 floors. So of course she pushed 6. Baaaad idea. Floor 6 is a maintenance floor. We got to the sixth floor and realized what it was and pressed the 0 floor button to go back to the ground floor. But nooo go. The elevator was kaput. So we got out on the the sixth floor hoping that we could take the stairs down one floor and get to the right spot. But it appeared to be a staircase just for maintenance and of course every door was locked. I had Callie and the diaper bag, while Mom was lugging the crazy heavy stroller down 6 flights of stairs. We got down to the bottom floor and for a moment I thought we were going to be locked inside, but managed to finagle the door open. So that was an interesting way to start the day. We stopped at Midore for some breakfast. I opted for water and a mini bagette to settle my stomach. Then we caught our bus to Notre Dame.
It was a lovely sight!

Callie was calm all the way until, you guessed it, the moment we walked into the ever so quiet cathedral. Fantastic. She started sneezing, I think because of the dusty smell inside. I kept her calm enough to get through the church quickly and out we went. I was hoping to get my mom to climb the steps to the top to see the view, but the line was crazy long, so we opted to sit at a cafe and get crepes and feed Callie as she was getting pissed. We hit up some souveneir shops and walked down to the Bastille. I picked up a Tour de France onesie for Callie, because I knew her daddy would want her to have one:) Then we walked back, but we didn't really realize just how far we had walked. We got all turned around. We just wanted to find our way back to ND to get our bus. We took out our map and this very nice lady in a Washington Redskins tshirt asked us in a heavy french accent if we needed help. It was so nice! We found our way back to a bus that would get us back to our area. Some very nice folks offered their seats to me. I must have looked totally exhausted with Callie dead asleep on me in the ergo. We made it back and waited for Bill to come home.
Because tonight was date night! Hooray! I was definitely in dire need of a break from Callie. We found this really nice restaurant called Le Grand Cafe de Capuccin. It was all decorated in Art Deco stuff. Gorgeous! It was a very nice meal. I decided to give onion soup one more try, as I had read online that this place had a good one. But it was mostly meh. We had a lovely bottle of Rhone wine and a great meal.

Bill got a lime sherbet for desert with a curious addition.

That's right. Vodka.



I had a very good creme brulee. After dinner we decided to take the metro to the Arc of the Triumph since we hadn't been there yet. We couldn't quite figure out the map, so Bill went up to the ticket agent and asked for tickets to the Arc of Triumph. Ends up there are 2 Arcs and the they gave us the ticket to the wrong one. So we ended up at The Grand Arc. Which is kind of this weird square arc.

Nearby we discovered a sculpture of a very life like giant thumb. Very odd. We were determined to get to the other Arc so we got a taxi. Now here is where it gets interesting. The taxi driver dropped us off in front of the middle of the Arc near the eternal flame.

We did wonder why no one else was there.

Then suddenly two police officers came our way and they told us fairly aggressively that the Arc was closed and we had to leave. Okey dokey, so sweat. Or not...We went into the subterranean exit, which is normally the way you get out. But we found ourselves faced with two locked doors.

Door # 1

Door #2
So there was only one other way to get across the street. Run across some of the scariest traffic I've ever seen. If you've ever been to the Arc you know that it is a gigantic roundabout with about 5 lanes of traffic going pretty darn fast. So we walk out and try to find an opening to no avail. Then our friends the police officers return telling us it is forbidden to be at the arc. Uh huh. Thanks. Then they say "you must cross now!" I was pretty much scared shitless at this point as motorcycles, scooters, taxis and cars are zooming by with very few gaps. The police officers wait about 10 seconds and ask "Do you want help crossing the street?" As if we are babies. Of course we say yes. So the cops just walk out into the traffic and each lane of traffic swerves to avoid them. No one stops mind you. So we follow them most of the way and then dash across the rest of the roundabout. Then we grabbed a taxi back to the apartment, very glad to have survived our date night.