Day 10

We woke up this  morning, not so late because we did not shut the blinds all the way. We made breakfast again, and headed out to the catacombs. We stood in line for 1.5 hours to see some bones. The catacombs are underground caves filled with bones from the 18th and 19th centuries. As Paris expanded they decided to empty the cemetaries in order to build and help control some of the disease that was spreading.

After walking the catacombs we went to the Louvre. We had packed our lunch to have a picnic and just needed to pick up a baguette. We wandered for a bit trying to find one, which seemed odd because it was Paris. We found one. Along the way, discovered our final tourist scams. This one involved a person pretending to be disabled and/or deaf. They try to get you to sign their form or give them money all while they are in your belongings rooting. There were multiple people doing this in one spot so it was a good distraction if you weren't paying attention. There were people who bought this one big time.

We continued back to the center of the Louvre gardens where the famous pyramids are, found some steps in the shade and sat down. We ate our meats, cheeses and bread while relaxing. This random guy came over with his bucket of water bottles trying to hide from the police. He then wandered off to the roundabout in front and ditched his bucket in the bushes and walked off. He obviously didn't want the ticket that he would have been written.


We headed back down to the underground mall to get our tickets and head in. The lines were chaotic and long. We got in a line, which we later discovered was the group line and became members of an Arkansas Music group. We walked right in, no problems, their tour guide instructed us to put our bags through the security scanners and we continued on while they organized themselves. It worked wonderfully.

We headed up to see Mona Lisa, which was chaos to the max. I am not quite sure that Alan really understood how chaotic it would be. He was tired and did not want to fight the crowds. We turned around and headed towards the french paintings. It was on the 2nd floor, which was like walking up to the 5th or 6th floor. We stopped at the 1st floor and sat on a bench. That is as far as we got. We sat for a while and decided to head home. We got home and napped. After napping, we got ready to go to the restaurant we mentioned in the previous post.

Upon arrival, Mr. Allemoz recognized us from the previous night, let his wife know who we were and the first thing she asked us was if we wanted champagne. Of course we did. She sat us at our table and brought us some olives. I don't typically like green olives but these were very good. We pondered over the menu because we weren't very sure what we wanted.

Alan had the eggplant caviar, steak tartare and chocolate cake. I had fillet of duck. All was outstanding. We were not sure about the steak tartare to begin with, but went on the strong recommendations from Sacha. We are glad we did. We drank wine, and relaxed for quite a while. I also had an espresso with milk. Boy howdy, it was strong.

Once home, we finished packing because 6am was going to be early.

Mr. & Mrs. Green