Trip to Paris

After their very busy school vacation from the 5th to the 20th of April, Molly and Betsy headed back to same-age friends and normally structured days. Cricket and Sandy, by contrast, went to Paris. They wanted to do something that wouldn't be possible with the children, but figuring out what, exactly, to do on a midweek daytrip was a trick.

In the end, they decided to go see the part of Paris neither of them had yet laid eyes on: high fashion. They gazed in windows in the small tree-lined Avenue Montaigne just off the Champs-Elysées. After a very-delayed train ride and a stop into the human resources offices of the SNCF (French trains) to say hello to Katia (the extraordinarily generous woman who lent Cricket, Dave, and the girls her house for those first couple of otherwise-homeless weeks here), Cricket and Sandy stopped for a perfect lunch of quiche and salad, and were off.

Instead of shopping for actual items of clothing, they went shopping for shapes and details for Cricket to use back in the States when she can play at sewing again. Most of what they saw was far, far beyond her skills, but it was fun to imagine being able to create things like that anyway. After all, we can't paint, either, but who is to stop us from enjoying a good masterpiece with the rest of the hacks? Our most successful stops were by far the first, at Jil Sander, where the salesfolk were universally nice to us, and the last, at a fashion house neither of us can now remember the name of, but where they'd used materials in really interesting, wearable ways.

The avenue Montaigne also gave us this gem of a statue of the Queen of Belgium with Marianne, the symbol of France. Amazing how you can see the shape of the Queen's leg through her flowing royal stone robes!
We also got lucky with a full orchestra playing regional French music in the metro...








... and managed to fit in a brief trip to the actual inside of Notre Dame, with some delightful stops at the bouquinistes along the Seine. Check out those flying buttresses on the back of Notre Dame (on the way back to catch a train at the Gare d'Austerlitz)!

Thank you to Dave, who took care of all the school drop-offs and pickups, and to Molly and Betsy, who "babysat themselves" by putting themselves to bed quietly and at a reasonable hour during Dave's conference call that evening.