Thursday 14 August 2014

Paris...with the kids in tow. The Louvre.

I guess this has to start with the admission that I just turned 40.  It's okay.  I feel it.

To mark the occasional, my long suffering longhair suggested going to Paris.  I think he may have had a romantic weekend without the kids in mind but having had them, we can't escape without them.  Plus, the eldest long longhair was scheduled to go to France with the school and quite wanted his first trip abroad to be with us.  This seemed reasonable.

So, one July morning we packed our bright yellow suitcases, gripped our tickets tightly, and headed off.   It turns out that the Eurostar is pretty darned fine, mainly because we didn't have to throw indignant assholes out of our reserved seats.  Also, drinking a bottle of wine with olives and crisps on the return journey ensured that we had a jolly good time on the way home.  The genteel group of proper grown ups across the aisle may disagree.

On the whole, I reckon that Paris isn't for kids - all kiddy activity is safely siphoned off to Disneyland Paris or Asterix World.  That's okay by us but after the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, Sacre Coure, the Louvre, Montparnasse Cemetery, Père Lachaise Cemetery, and the Paris Museum of Modern Art even the Catacombs would have come as a bit of light relief for them - but not with a 3 hour queue on the Sunday and being closed on the Monday.

We found ways of entertaining ourselves (the trials of feeding an almost vegan child in Paris shall be glossed over until I can face revisiting them).  We did a lot of walking, spotting graffiti, drinking wine by the canal, identifying obscure vehicles, stopping on Metro platforms just because they looked good and dodging puddles of wee in the morning.

The Louvre with kids was a potential nightmare, but we did get round a great deal of it.  First we renamed a few artworks, mainly in desperation as the smaller longhairs were about to revolt...

Kiddy lunchtime woes.

DARLING, THE INTERNET HAS GONE DOWN

End of slumber.
 Then the kids actually seemed to start enjoying it a bit...

We just found this funny.  Very funny.

How were we not...
...asked to leave?
Lots of people taking photos of a painting.  We may have mocked them.
 
Perhaps time to leave?
Yes, time to leave.
But we couldn't go without a long chat about
these men regarding their curly wurly willies.
And then we were gone.  Right after I'd shamefully gone back to security to pick up my penknife that had been confiscated on entry.  Still a menace to the artworld at 40 ;)