We are not doing very well at getting out of the house early. After another lovely French breakfast in our apartment we walked down to Notre Dame. There was a queue to enter and plenty of people already wandering inside despite the earlyish hour and the fact that there was a mass in progress. Carolina joined the mass and took communion. Eva was not particularly patient but the boys were suitably awed by the cathedral and at how different it was to the Italian ones we had recently seen. We recovered with coffee and crepe at somewhat hideous expense in a nearby cafe before heading to St Chapelle at the other end of the Ille de la Cite. The queue there was long and apparently not moving at all. I don't remember having to queue for St Chapelle on previous visits and I was rather disappointed. The natives were getting restless and we decided to give up whilst we were ahead and return another day (I hope). The Ille de la Cite is very touristy as evidenced by the crepe price index which was high. (4-4.50 euro/nutella crepe compared to only 3euro in the vicinity of our apartment).
To our delight we had bumped into our Sydney friends Tash and Rob Cheval and their three boys Oscar (in Sam's class), Hugo and Louis in the Pompidou the day before. The big topic of conversation had been a huge toy shop the boys had visited. Our children were desperate to follow suit. I googled 'biggest toy shop in Paris' that evening and found a likely candidate near Printemp and the other Grand Magazin and as I knew there would be no peace until we went, there we headed after our high brow, churchy morning. Consuming our bread rolls on the way, we alighted at Madeleine and after some effort found a very closed toy shop. Sigh. Very disappointing. I thought we might compensate by visiting the toy departments in one of the big shops. Carolina and I were rather keen to see at least one of them anyway. It is a beautiful area around the big shops. We stumbled upon Fourchon which was, of course a delight. The chocolate, the cakes, the Macarons, the madelines.
Printemp was quite overwhelming. We started in the perfume area, where I spent an intensive 5 minutes choosing my perfume for the next 10 years or so. I like to put time and thought into these decisions. (My previous bottle has been going for rather longer than that and is just running out). (I bought Opium, which I love, if you are at all interested). We the ascended up the floors, lodging ourselves for some time in the fascinating homewares department which was full of delicious, beautiful and almost entirely useless and uncessessary things of great delight. We refrained. Carolina escaped into the women's area briefly and returned scathed but essentially unharmed. The children and I located the toys and despite Eva's expressed NEED to buy something, escaped again in tact. The boys weren't actually very interested. We escaped to the basement, bypassing the designer labels which did make brief but marvellous viewing. Down the bottom we discovered some reasonably priced and very lovely scarves and indulged modestly.
We escaped into the streets and walked home via Les Halles where I managed to locate a sim for my iPad, which I am, as I write, completely unable to recharge because the phone message on the phone recharging number is in rapid french and rather than transferring you to an operator when you fail to provide the required response like in OZ, it just hangs up on you. The website is untranslatable, even with google translator and hence I am stuck until the morning when I shall venture out to the shop again. What a pain. I have great sympathy now for non-english speakers attempting to negotiate their way through those dreadful phone messages that say, please state your problem in simple terms. Hard enough in the native language to understand what they want.
The boys were after some peculiar piece of dongle-ware for connecting some device to another and Alex had googled it and believed himself to have located it in a shop called FNAC which we then located in Les Halles. It turned out to be the biggest book/DVD/phone/IT shop I have EVER seen. We remained stuck for some time, transfixed by its enormity.
We eventually escaped and staggered back to the apartment for a bread and cheese supper before collapsing terribly early. We must have walked many many kilometres.
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