It’s Phyllis’ birthday and we are headed for a full day at the Louvre. We slept in and had a large brunch with coffee that I can taste months later. All of the sidewalk cafes have a prix fixe breakfast and are well worth sitting for to start the day with people watching.
The Louvre is huge. Sure, you’ve read about it before- it is very, very, very large and you could spend three days in it and be lost and maybe forget to leave a trail and be wandering the halls well past your flight home. But you have to understand, that is all understatement. It is absolutely, magnificently, stupendously huge. And that’s the first floor.
My Favorite painting. Well, besides the Harem.
I’m a complete art novice and I’m sure I will get everything wrong- I’ll like the wrong pictures and think something priceless is a stupid piece of junk (I’m looking at you victory, yes you. Ugh. Snooze). But I absolutely love some of the pictures and even the Mona Lisa, which I am fairly sure other people know about. The Harem, Italy, Temptation of Jesus are all wonderful. The Raft is stunning. But I love the statues. I love to wander among them and photograph them. The detail and form the Greek and Roman artists used are quite stunning.
So, you’ve taken your wife to Paris for a week without the kids, over her birthday, you had better make sure you’ve arranged a nice dinner on the day. And I had. I had researched and found a nice mix of French home cooking, just a little tiny bit upscale and raved about on Trip Advisor. So I had. And I had made reservations via email. An odd way to do it, but it seemed to work. The people at Aux Lionnaise seemed nice enough and setup the reservation no problem. Well, no problem until we showed up and saw that they are closed for the month of August, conveniently starting on July 27. Sure, they could have mentioned that in the email and pointed out that they would actually be CLOSED the day I made the reservation for, but, well, that wouldn’t be very French, would it? After apologizing profusely to Phyllis, we made for a corner and found a wonderful restaurant. I didn’t write down the name, but it is just on the corner down from a very rude and probably closed all year round Aux Lionnaise.
After dinner, we cabbed it out to the Eiffel Tower. It was a long wait to get all the way to the top- wait at the bottom to get a ticket, then wait at the 2nd level in a huge line to get to the top. There was a distant lightening storm as we waited to ascend that back lit clouds off to the north. The Eiffel Tower has an EU light show that started as we went up. At the top, the clouds continued to flash in sudden silhouettes. We had champagne at the top and toasted the 11th anniversary of Phyllis’ 29th birthday.
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