Paris: How Masha got her stripes
We began our second full day in Paris with a very simple, concise plan: walk by Louvre, glance at Jardin des Tuilleries, play around Luxembourg gardens, take a quick boat tour, get a Baba au Rum at Stohrer, where it was first created, and finish off with some ice cream at Berthillion.
Luckily these places are all pretty close (they all fit on one google maps screen, at some level of zoom), so shouldn’t be a problem!
We knocked Tuilleries off the list first, as it was directly between our metro stop and Louvre. It actually took a while, as there is so much to do on the way -
You can lounge at the free chairs at Bassin Octogonal,
explore playgrounds,
spin into the sky slowly (ok we skipped this),
or rapidly. Seriously who does this??!! Also, I was piqued by the contrast of two hundred year old buildings and this horrifying contraption.
We could not, though, pass up spinning slowly and horizontally (even if we did have to go to an ATM to make it happen).
Finally we made it to Louvre
Ok, that’s enough culture, Louvre seen (from afar), moving on. Fleeing the onslaught of waves of tourists, we took turn after turn down Parisian boulevards, coming upon this. Dunno what it is, but we’re gonna dance —
Walking on, we hit the awesome Palais-Royal Garden - the place Sagita told us to go to as one of her favorite spots in Paris. We agree!
And that’s how Masha earned her stripes.
From stripe-land, we headed for Stohrer After two hundred years, it’s still there, open and still selling babas. Score! After purchasing an obnoxious amounts of desserts, we realized that Stohrer doesn’t have any tables, so we were obliged to wander Paris streets searching for a place to sit and enjoy our haul. While Notre Dame is under repair, the shadow of the imposing Saint-Eustache cathedral would have to do.
Our sugar thirst sated, it was time to get to Masha’s #1 mission for the day - boat tour! Imagine our horror when, getting to the boat stops, we found out that all the tour boats in the vicinity have been rented out for the day for some sort of private woodland creature cosplay festival (wish we had pictures of the hundreds of these woodland creatures - probably from a Google company party 😡 - passing us as we watched them go to OUR boats!).
And so, plan B: quiet river contemplation from bridges. I tried to console Masha — only to find her inconsolable.
Contemplation time was cut short as we had to get back to a time-release playground we randomly discovered before the boat-disaster (more on this in Alya’s post). On our way, we encountered a Very. Hip. Mall.
By the end of the day, we only hit half of our already supremely conservative list, missing out on Berthillion’s premier glaces, Luxembourg gardens, and of course the boat tour. But if not all what we wanted, perhaps we got what we needed...(except for Masha, that is, she never did get her boat..the [Google] creatures took it..).
