Today 10.20, still at home on second coffee. Yesterday’s 690 steps+ up the Eiffel Tower, followed by four hours of walking was too much for some, even though we had climbed three bell towers in preparation. Unlike the youth hostels of old, which made themselves as unappealing as possible to get you going (and besides they close their doors from 10 till 2) the places we are staying in are so homely and cosy that we can barely drag ourselves away. This ‘charming flat in the Sorbonne’, sides onto the ‘smallest street in Paris’ and it has a bathroom to match, where even my knees touch the wall when I am on the loo and I need to have the door open to stand in front of the sink. The floor, walls and ceiling are on a slope so it appears that we are in a perpetual Escher painting and you don’t even need to have indulged in 3 Euro bottles of sav blanc to stagger about the room. Totally gorgeous. Totally what ones expects from a building with 13th century foundations. It is a slight change from M and M’s apartment whose living space was possibly larger then our whole Northcote block. With 5 storeys from laundry to playroom, who needs jogging or the gym.

…. it is the next day now as Mick and I spend every evening playing scrabble online and making up words, many of which the computer accepts. What on earth is a wawa or laids. When in doubt just make up a work and hit ‘play’. Anyhow, I rarely have time to write as I labour for hours over how to use my ‘x’, ‘z’ and ‘g’ in the same word. I am going to try to cover a few days with this one.

(two days later)

Going backwards… we have just had a great meal with 5 tired kids at a restaurant called Fish a Bouillabaise. Apparently it is an Anglo hang out, though we did not know this as we walked past. It just had an interesting menu and could seat 9. The staff speak perfect English, but the menu is only in French. They offered to do us a special menu for the kids of Barley with eschalotte sauce. Frenchy ate hers. Lala required some bribing. When we left it was packed and there were people waiting for tables, glasses of wine in hand inside and out, even though it was about 1 degree.

This followed an excellent lunch at the Musee D’Orsay, in the old train station dining room, with a ceiling to rival St Peters in Rome. We arrived there about 1pm to find that there was a queue of about 400-500 people (give or take) and we were all set to bail when M decides to have a chat to the man at the door who promptly waves us past the whole queue. Go figure! M claims he just said that the kids were hungry. Maybe that is all it takes in France: Les Enfants qui ont faim. Once inside it was absolutely overwhelming: the architecture, the artwork, the sheer amount of people. The kids of course were soon restless and underwhelmed by the art, but did not lie on the ground claiming utter boredom as they did at the Uffizzi. Instead they ran around and we were given two whole hours to see a couple of thousand works.

Getting around town with 9 people is always a bit of an effort. Our last two big journeys also involved 9 but we had 3 boys to complement our two girls. the boys kept things moving and also provided entertainment for our two watching the boys beat each other up all day. This trip the girls have taken to beating each other up, which, along side, not having trimmed their nails has made for a few tears. Today we are off the the louvre with the promise of no conceptual art and more hot chocolate