Sunday 18th

Monday 19th September The children are asleep and it is time to tie up the loose ends. The housekeeping of travel is really quite time consuming - sorting the photos, checking and responding to email, planning the next day's activities (which never seem to follow the plan), doing the washing, tidying up - some things don't change wherever you are. Our circadian rhythms are still a little out of whack. We seem to be moving into a rather meditteranean living  pattern with late nights and late rising. We have spent the past two days exploring our locality. Yesterday morning some members of the team ventured out to find the all important first breakfast of croissants and baguette, only to find the one around the corner closed and, in fact most things closed. After a lengthy walk we finally spied what we were after and returned triumphant to a truly glorious breakfast (luckily we had bought our jar of Bon Maman raspberry jam the night before). The morning was crisp - what a delight to be cool after Rome. It is such a delight to explore a  neighbourhood for the first time. Being a Sunday, many shops were closed and shuttered and did not reveal themselves until this morning's excursion for breakfast materials. We seem to be surrounded by a mixture of high class shops, adult sex shops and peep-shows (Alex was very disapproving and insisted that we don't pass that way again), members of the rag trade - this evening as we returned to the apartment they were sweeping  the cut offs out of their shops and into the street, top end furniture shops with exquisite modern furniture and lots of little restaurants and cafes. We've noticed quite a few sushi restaurants and kebab shops mixed in with the Brasseries and Cafes, Creperies and patisseries. Yesterday was cloudy and cool with occasional drizzle. We revelled in it. After leaving the apartment we headed  in the general direction of Notre Dame and bumped into the Georges Pompidou centre on the way. The children were delighted by the external elevators (which Eva has renamed 'Alligators') and hence, in we went. There were no queues and we were able to proceed through with great ease and delight. Unfortunately the Edvard Munch exhibition doesn't open until Wednesday but we were able to see a rather wonderful and at times confronting temporary exhibition of collaborations between Indian and French artists.  After proudly and piously eating our packed lunch of cut up baguette with suitably french fillings, we proceeded to the permanent exhibition  which the children, on the whole, really embraced much to my delight. It is an astonishingly rich gallery. Eva drew throughout the visit, filling more than one notebook with colourful drawings that did not look at all out of place in the gallery. Several people stopped to admire them! The boys now want sketchbooks too. It is surprisingly hard to find a plain sketchbook. The cheap school notebooks are of course all what we would call 'graph paper'. Not that she seems to mind. I shall have to store them all afterwards as Eva's 'Paris Ouevre'. One of the other delights of the Pompidou was the gift shops - full of such beautiful design and imagination. (though if you are after something as mundane and an emergency pack of coloured pens or pencils it is less useful). Both Carolina and I succumbed to rather gorgeous glass rings and I to another colourful watch to complement my recently purchased Egyptian themed MOMA one. Fun to wear. The children were very keen to 'do' the Eiffel tower. I stupidly thought we might 'quickly' sneak in a visit before dinner. by the time we had negotiated the metro, RER and a decent walk in-between it was after 7pm by the time we got there,  with dark clouds threatening, spitting rain and a healthy wind. The queue was considerable if not extreme and it was tempting to turn back but I couldn't bear the thought of getting there again and experience tells me that saying that you'll come back and see it another day usually means that you don't. So we did it. Sam, Alex and Carolina were keen  to climb to the very top. I wasn't and the queues for the very top were even longer. As I suspected, once we reached the middle level and everyone had been outside in the rain and wind and cold for  minutes, they were all very happy  to come down again and very happy not to be going any higher. The view was spectacular of course and the children  were very excited to have been there although that excitement wore off very quickly once were stuck in a long queue, packed like sardines into an elevator and thrust into the elements. I felt rather sorry for the grumpy, tired elevator  operators and ticket sellers who had to deal with grumpy, rude and tired tourists all day long. Ascending the tower does have an air of the pilgrimage about it. After this visit I think I will preserve its magic from a distance rather than climb it again. By the time we returned home it was well after 9 and too late to find anything open locally for dinner. Luckily we had plenty left over in the fridge from the day before an enjoyed an ad hoc supper of eggs, bread, cheese, salami and fruit, classic of the German 'Abendbrot' tradition which seems to make a great deal of sense. The children enjoyed their first crepe with nutella and St Michel yesterday. They were greatly approved of.