Malher Center

You might think that after walking from Porto to Santiago we’d have legs of steel. And you’d be wrong. This morning Ellen woke up feeling worn down and fighting congestion so I told her we’d take it easy today. Hah! We walked for hours all around the right bank, visiting cute little shops and wandering through shopping arcades. We grabbed sandwiches for lunch and ate them in a courtyard outside the Louvre then, quelle surprise, we went inside.

On our way to the Louvre we went in an adorable little fabric store, Lil Weasel, in the Passage de Grand Cerf shopping arcade where we both bought fat quarters and ribbon made from Liberty of London fabric. A little while later passing through Les Halles we got sucked into Le Droguerie, a haberdashery/notions shop that had shelves of glass jars filled with beads, hundreds of little drawers filled with buttons, yards of ribbon and trim, and spools of yarn in every imaginable color. Delightful.

When we got to The Louvre there was a long line of people waiting to buy tickets. Instead of standing in line I was able to log on to the museum website and buy tickets on the spot. Easy peasy. Were skipped the queue and headed straight through security.

The museum was pretty crowded today and is impossible to navigate efficiently even when it’s not but we wandered the two main galleries of European paintings until we’d had enough. We opted not to join the long queue to see Mona Lisa up close. We’d both seen her before.

Your mind goes a little numb trying to absorb so much art in one day. Everywhere you turn is another famous masterpiece. The collection is just so immense and the building is such a maze of corridors and stairways it’s overwhelming. We walked up and down so many flights of stairs just trying to get from one wing or floor to another our legs were barely holding us up by the time we staggered through the hall of Greek sculpture to visit the Venus de Milo. When they announced it was closing time I was relieved.

Eight hours later we shuffled back to our hotel and collapsed. Except we hadn’t had dinner. We decided to head to the Franprix grocery store around the corner but somehow ended up stopping at a cute little Mexican restaurant we passed on the way. Yeah, it’s maybe a bit weird to eat Mexica n food in Paris but it was quick, easy, and filling.Read more