Well, I slept until 9am this morning. Breakfast was quite unusual, I think. The French don't seem to eat cereal in the morning, and if
we had wanted cereal, it wouldn't not have been inclucded in the "free" breakfast we were supposed to have. It didn't worry me too much,
since I was in Paris to experience the culture and part of that is eating how the French eat (I know, Sushimi for lunch is a bit out of
character there, but I saw it yesterday, and just had to have it!). I think my mum was a bit upset, but she made do with some
croissants. What the French do eat for breakfast, it seems, is cold meats and hard boiled eggs. So I ended up having very
rare slices of cold beef, smoked salmon and some scrambled eggs (they had a whole bowl full of hard boiled eggs, but it was too early in
the morning for me to tackle something so complicated...). It was quite nice, actually. I think it would take a while for me to get used
to eating meat in the morning though!
Since the tour of the Louvre yesterday was so short, we decided to go through it again for a few hours to take a slower look. I got an
audio guide so that I had something to explain the origins of some of the painting, but it's not as good as a live guide. For one thing,
the audio guide was a lot more politically correct and didn't mention any of the more "controversial" ideas about some of the paintings. I
also noticed that for Da Vinci's "Madonna on the Rocks" piece, the audio guide said the child on the right was Jesus and the one
on the left was John the Baptist, while our live guide had said it was the other way around. I guess it just goes to show that it's still
a hotly debated topic. It's difficult to say really, since the symbology of the two seem to be so mixed up. For example, it was convential
in those days to put Jesus higher up than John, and in the Maddona on the Rocks, the left-hand figure is higher. But it's also convention
to have it so that Jesus is blessing John, but in the Madonna on the Rocks, it's the right-hand figure that is
doing the blessing. Mary is supposed (again, by convention - the church liked their paintings to all have a very clear meaning, the common
people in those days weren't particularly bright, and the church wanted the message to be quite clear) to be laying a comforting arm on
baby Jesus, but in the Madonna on the Rocks, you could take either baby as being "comforted" by Mary. So it's all a bit of a mystery.
We had lunch today in a little road-side café. I couldn't stay in Paris without going to a road-side café, and it was definately worth it. Our waitress didn't speak much English, so it was a little difficult, but we managed OK. The food was amazing (I haven't had one bad meal in Paris; the portions are much smaller than in England, but that's OK, since the English seem to feel that quantity over quality is an alright trade-off).
After lunch we went to the Champs Elysée, for a bit of a walk. It's a beautiful part of Paris, and the shops are all quite expensive. In fact, the Louis Vuitton store there was more like a night club than an actual shop. There were bouncers out the front, and a rather long line to get in. We weren't famous enough to get straight in, and I was quite sure that I wouldn't have been able to afford anything in there anyway, so I didn't bother lining up. Maybe next time :)
In fact, there weren't many stores there that we could have affored to shop at. The cafés and food shops were a broad spectrum (all the way from McDonald's to places where it was 20€ for a coffee). But it's definately an experience I would recommend to everyone. In fact, anything in Paris is an experience I would recommend to everyone.
We had to back at the train station by 6:30pm for our return train ride back to London, but we were a little early. After two days on the move, and not much sleep last night (especially since on Thursday we were up at 5am and not to bed until 2am the next morning!) so we just had a bit of a rest at the train station. The ride home was pleasant, though the train was a lot fuller than the ride over, so I never got a seat to myself. But it's really over before you know it, and I was snug in my bed in London by 11 o'clock (Paris is one hour in front of London, so that would have been 12am Paris time). A very long couple of days, indeed!