The Nomadic Adventurers: Our Parisian Apartment

Today was a just chillin’ day. We headed out around 11:00 AM for some crepes but of course nothing was open until noon. We walked all around the Montparnasse area and finally found a “steak house” serving lunch. The restaurant had the name “Hippo” and Jim was a bit hesitant to go in. I, on the other hand, was starving.

I broke my vow of vegetarianism and ordered a Hippo Burger. I think it was beef. I am not sure to tell you the truth but it was very tasty and very tender. It had a blue cheese sauce on it also. Jim had a chicken skewer that I am sure was chicken. My lunch came with a dessert so I ordered a tart with pineapple. The picture looked like it had a tart shell, some chocolate on the bottom and pineapple on top. Imagine my surprise when I got a circle of finely diced pineapple with a scoop of ice cream. No tart shell and no chocolate. Tres sad!

We then left for the Petit Palace which is one of the beautiful buildings built around the end of the 1800’s and then used for the exposition of 1900. It houses some little known art with a few famous ones (like Monet) thrown in. It is free so that in itself is a good thing too.

As we were trying to find the Palace we were a little turned around. It is very hard when you emerge from the underground and try and get your bearings. They don’t place north/south signs anywhere to help tourists.

Lucky for us we knew that Paris was designed in a straight line from Notre Dame, Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe. Once we got sight of the Arc and stood in front of the Concorde we knew which direction to go.

We were walking along this long boulevard and I thought how pretty it was. People were sitting on benches under trees and it was all very quaint. I then looked at the map and saw we were at the start of the Champs-Elysee! Closer to the Arc de Triomphe is the entire classy, boutique, rich stuff but where we were it was just a lovely, tree-lined boulevard with benches and Palaces nearby.

After seeing the Petit Palace we headed back on the Metro to home. One metro stop away from our normal one we decided to get out and walk. Unfortunately it is the Montparnasse metro stop that has to be one of the largest ones in the world if not the largest. So many lines intersect there and it is also a train station that it took us longer to just get out of the underground than it would have if we had continued on to our stop!

Walking home we found our favorite store from last time we visited, Paris’ version of Target, Monoprix. Upstairs are all the nice things like clothing, makeup, etc and downstairs in the basement is the grocery store. The funny thing I noticed this time is if you are shopping downstairs you need to go upstairs to checkout. What to do with the filled shopping cart? Well you hook your shopping cart on its own escalator and up it goes while you are riding next to it. Pretty clever of these French!

Since my pedometer measured 20,000 steps today I felt like we could celebrate a little so we stopped at our local boulangerie for a baguette and a pastry and had a great dinner of soup, brie and baguette, fruit and our delightful pastry. Jim says the pedometer is broken.

Here is a picture of half of the living room