Paris – Day 5 can be found here.
Up shortly after 8 am to find a cold, wet Paris. I can’t say it’s terribly surprising, as it is mid-March – if anything, we were expecting our plans to be affected by the rain more often then they had been. So far it’s just rained on our first day at Disney, a bit during our pastry tour, and now.
But now it’s really raining.
Still, we need to pick up baguette and it’s not like we’re going to use the leftovers from yesterday. Sacrilege!
We tried our new favourite-as-of-yesterday bakery, only to discover they were closed on Sundays. Thankfully, this is Paris so we were able to find a second excellent artisinal bakery about 100 metres down the road. No baguette traditionalle, but they did have a skinny baguette called ficelle so we ordered that instead, along with some croissant.
As an aside, there are certain kinds of croissant that are made with margarine (“croissant ordinaire”) so keep an eye on the label. The ones with butter taste better, in my opinion. The butter ones are straight, while the ones made with margarine tend to have more of a crescent shape. (Confusing given that “croissant” means “crescent”, but there you have it.) Or you can order “croissant buerre” if you want to be on the safe side.
Back to the apartment, where we had a delicious breakfast of butter croissant and jam. (Nothing fancy in terms of jam – they seem to mostly use the same bonne maman jam you can find in Canadian grocery stores. Though perhaps worth searching out some artisinal French jam at some point during a future visit.)
Still raining, so we played a round of Dungeons & Dragons and the kids had some more time to listen to their podcasts. That took us until around 2 pm, at which point everyone was going a bit stir crazy – but thankfully the rain had stopped, just in time for our trip to the Musee d’Orsay.
Here we enjoyed walking through the galleries, taking in some of the beautiful paintings including Renoir, Monet and Van Gogh.
Renoir…
More Renoir…
And two Van Goghs
They also have a lovely cafe, but it was jammed.
It was fun showing the kids some of the different techniques used to create artistic effects. Such as the dot patterns by Georges Lemmen, which resolves into a clear image at a greater distance.
There were also some interesting exhibits regarding French shadow theatre, and the early history of film.
Again, it was fascinating to learn more about the artistic process, and to discover that many of them had to strive for years and years before their work was recognized. Here’s an absolutely massive painting by Gustave Courbet – The Artist’s Studio – that was initially rejected for exhibition at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1855. Today thousands upon thousands of visitors to the Musee d’Orsay view it every day.
We left around 5:40 pm, expecting it was going to be a quick walk to our restaurant – Le Maison de l’Aubrac – only to discover that Google Maps had led us astray, and that it was instead going to be a 30 minute walk. So we booted it along the Champs d’Elysees, stopping just long enough to take a few photos.
We made it about 10 minutes late – but still ended up in the overflow seating upstairs. Ah, well. It filled in soon enough, and at least we had a nice booth for the kids to sit in. And it’s the same food, regardless – which shoudl be excellent, as l’Aubrac was rated one of the top 100 steakhouses in the world.
To start, we had the truffle croquets:
Followed by the farcous (salty pancakes):
My wife, myself and my daughter all had tenderloin as our main course:
Except for our son, who had the cheeseburger:
For dessert, the kids once more had the profiteroles:
While my wife and I shared another tart tatin which we managed to eat before getting photos.
It was a delicious meal, and their wine pairings were top notch. A bit expensive at around 240 Euro for all of us, but well worth the cost considering the quality and the number of courses involved.
We then walked back to our apartment – another 30 minutes on foot, but the kids didn’t complain. After all, they had this spectacular view to look at:
Continue reading Paris – Day 7.