From London to Paris

Paris, France

We are in Paris. And we are currently spending our afternoon sitting in our little apartment watching Dr Who because right now Paris is feeling overwhelming and the Doctor seems familiar and safe, weeping angels and all. We arrived via the Eurostar yesterday afternoon and eventually managed to figure out how to get ourselves tickets and get on the underground and then off in the general vicinity of our apartment. Though getting out of the underground station proved to be a pretty big challenge when our tickets would not open the turnstiles. In the end some friendly Parisians essentially helped us all jump the turnstiles and shove our luggage through and then we walked the rest of the way to our apartment rather than try to work out how the bus system worked. And then we listened and nodded and murmured 'd'accord' a lot while a very talkative non-English speaking woman showed us all around our tiny apartment.

Our whirlwind London tour finished up Tuesday with a trip to the Churchill War Rooms, which then inspired us to watch Darkest Hour that night. The War Rooms was the first line of any size we had to stand in through our whole visit in London, mostly thanks to that movie, but it was very cool and now Fionn can recite the names of many of Churchill's pets. Really. We saw other things in our last few days too. We went to the British Museum, the Tate Modern museum, and the Victoria and Albert museum. The general opinion of the Tate modern was that most of it was weird, but we did see an actual Salvador Dali painting and a Degas sculpture, plus the view of London from the top floor is pretty great. The British museum is awesome but also just plain overwhelming, there is so much to see that after awhile I got a little numb to it and I would find myself walking into a new gallery, rolling my eyes, and thinking "Seriously? MORE ancient Greek pottery? Puhleeez." It also does make you wonder if possibly India and Turkey and Greece and Wakanda might just possibly want some of their own artifacts back. And the answer is yes, some of them would. Its also pretty cool to see the Rosetta Stone though (sorry, Egypt). Victoria and Albert was a similar experience of just so many things to see, but I am really partial to the sculpture there nonetheless (Rodin!), even if Liam did keep saying “More naked people?” We also covered many fandom bases when we toured the Globe theater, ate lunch on the steps of St Paul’s cathedral, walked all around St Bart’s Hospital till we found the spot that Sherlock jumped from and the plaque commemorating William Wallace, and of course walked across the Millenium bridge.

On Saturday though we took a break from sight seeing and instead took a train and visited cousins who live in a little town north of London. They fed us chili and let us play with their giant puppy, Bear. Ronan and Fionn learned to play netball and pie face. We walked around their little town and the neighboring St Albans and we just had fun not being tourists for a day.

And then we came to Paris and got a little bit lost and couldn’t find a decent grocery store that first night, were pretty disappointed in our first French bakery and are less than enamored of our funky little apartment. But we did find a good pizza place right away and a theater that is showing Ready Player One in English tomorrow and with some work got ourselves to and from a grocery store this morning so we have bread and chocolate and cheese and fruit. We will relax tonight, venture out again tomorrow, and will adjust.