La Ville-Lumière

On the backside of our trip, we are returning to familiar and much-loved ground.  We exit Europe via the City of Light.  Paris. 

On this trip, we visited a temporary exhibition in the Tuileries Gardens by South Korean businessman, entrepreneur, inventor and budding 71 year old photographer, Ahae.  The exhibit, called, Through My Window, distilled from 2.6 million photographs taken over the course of four years from Ahae's studio window.  They are beautiful -- some of the photos are more than 12 feet tall and you feel like you walked right into the scene.  

Because we could not wait one more minute, we satisfied our need for Asian food by finding a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant which served excellent pho.

Then we visited the legendary Shakespeare & Co., a favorite site for Grandpa Wong who once met its owner, George Whitman.  According to Whitman, Shakespeare & Co. was "a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore."  That sounds like a place Grandpa would love, and all it's missing is a bar that serves Coors Light.

To round out the trip, we visited the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle for the first time.  When Sophie was a baby, Mom brought her a book from Paris about Siam the Elephant.  

Kind of a longish book and all in French, but the gist of it was that Siam was brought over from Thailand to France, did some time in a circus, became famous and had his own TV show and ultimately was lovingly cared for at the National Zoo until his death.  Now here's the important part:  when Siam died (so explained the book) he was stuffed and displayed at the MNHN for future generations to admire and love!  (I know it's a weird kid's story.  It's French.)

This is a long wind-up to say that we saw him!  Siam!  In all his taxidermied wonderfulness.  A childhood story turned reality (albeit real in a stuffed kind of way).  We would not have been surprised to turn the corner and find a stuffed Lorax.

We found one more must-do Paris activity: climb the Eiffel Tower.  Sure, it's 279.1 meters of stairs, but that's better than waiting in the mile-long line for the elevator.  La Tour Eiffel is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower.  It was erected in 1889 as the entrance arch to the 1889 World's Fair.  Eiffel actually had an apartment at the top where he entertained guests!  The views are, indeed, spectacular.  

We are looking forward to our next return to Paris.  Our goal is make it a city where we feel like locals and not tourists.  Anna declares she may live there one day -- as either a fashion designer or chef.  So, we all need to start working on our French!