Happy late 4th of July. I hope that you all celebrated it with a barbeque and some fireworks. We did not. We began our official museum tour. We are planning on hitting a lot of them in the next 6 days, before we head off to Belgium for 4 days. We started by going to Musee Carnavalet, right around the corner from our apartment. The focus on the museum is the history of Paris. None of us know a lot about it so there was a huge learning curve. Understanding some of the history also helped us put a lot of the city landmarks in context. I hadn't realized that they were involved in so much fighting; essentially from 1789-1848, with a few years respite here and there.

The museum took most of the morning so it was time for lunch and we decided to pack a picnic and head to the Luxembourg Gardens. They are a large green space with gardens (duh), mini sailboats, tennis, playgrounds and a carousel. They have green chairs for people sit in and people watch. We spent a while outside of the ponds and then went to the playground. Griffin loves playgrounds. It was pretty cool and she spent about 45 minutes running around. After she took a ride on the carousel. It wasn't a large old one, but it had a cool twist. They give all the outside riders a baton, stick, and they try to skewer a metal ring as they pass by it. The goal is to collect as many as poosible. It wasn't as easy as it looked and Griff thought it made the ride interesting.

We walked home and picked up roasted chicken and potatoes. It was good. It was our first Sat. night, but we decided to stay home (the days of walking and standing can be pretty tiring). As I said earlier, we are staying above a cafe on a pretty lively corner and it was really rocking. I don't think it got quiet until about 2:00 am. Surprisingly, we are able to sleep through it, but it does make turning in early difficult.

We woke up this morning and decided to take advantage of "first Sunday of the month is free" for most museums. We headed off to Pompidou, the modern art museum, about 5 blocks away. It is a crazy looking building; all the insides (duct work, wires, tubing etc.) are on the outside. We spent about 3 hours looking at the permanent exhibit and plan on returning for the special Kadinsky and Calder exhibit. Three hours seems to be our max at museums, we all start getting crabby and hungry. Some highlights were the Henri Matisse works, Constantin Brancusi sculptures, Calder sculptures and the works by Picasso and George Braques. We all like modern art a lot, so it was fun. We all decided that the film, as modern art, wasn't our cup of tea.

We went out to lunch and had sushi. It was quite good. We are planning to return for another meal before we leave. The seafood in Paris is yummy. Afterwards we decided to head out to the Cluny Musee. It is a medievel museum on the left bank, by Sorbonne University. We decided that if you are in Paris for at least 6 months, we would recommend it, othewise skip it. It is housed in a architecturally interesting building, but it was too hot and didn't contain enough weaponry for our tastes. The best part was the Roman bath and the reclaimed heads from Notre Dame (some zealous citizens had decapitated them during the Revolution mistaking them for French monarchy-someone buried them in their yard and they were discovered in 1977).

Dinner is leftovers at home with fresh bread and wine. Tomorrow we will continue our museum quest. C'est tous pour maintenant.