Paris Day 4 (and our travel day home)

Our last day in Paris was all for the kids (or it was supposed to be).  We went a little bit further afield to Parc de la Villette to visit the Cite des Sciences & de l'Industrie, a huge science museum with a separate children's museum (the Cite des Enfants) inside.  You sign up for a specific time slot at the children's museum and you have to pick your age group, either 2-7 years old or 5-12 years old.  These divisions totally mystified me, so I picked 5-12 so the boys could be together and J wouldn't be bored and they did have fun with exhibits on making television programs, learning how fast they could run, manipulating waterworks, programming a robot, and learning about ant colonies, but I think they would have had more fun in the younger exhibit--oh well!  The rest of the museum was great, too, with a planetarium, a fun exhibit on taking risks (perfect for one of our little reluctant risk takers), and much of the exhibit was in English as well as French, which was a nice change.    We spent many, many hours there; time just sort of slipped away from us because we were so engaged.  Unfortunately, after we left, we went to find this legendary playground that was also at the park and along the way we saw signs for a giant new slide that that had just opened up, so the boys were all jazzed to find the playground, BUT, when we finally did, it turned out the new slide was monitored and only available to kids over eight years old...and two little boys were absolutely crushed!  That's one of my only complaints about Paris, actually, the playgrounds are just a tad too regimented for us!  We talked the boys down, played a while, and then made our way back home.

Programming a robot to build a house.

J on TV! 

Inside the ant colony!

Risky balance beam!

Some of our French culinary discoveries: roast chicken flavored Pringles
(I thought they were DISGUSTING) and apple Schweppes
(yummy, but lemon was even better).

It is a French museum, after all--no idea what this is for!

Now, this display I quite liked, actually!

After we left the museum, we took the long way home, getting off the metro early to walk along the Seine and then find a brasserie for dinner for a quintessential Parisian meal for our last dinner.   There was lots of food, and we loved it all!

I had pork filets with a mysterious gravy and mashed potatoes that E ate.

E had a croque monsieur, many fries, and all my potatoes.

Look at that food!

Salmon salad for J, which he loved!  

On the way back to our apartment, we decided to take a few pictures of what we passed going back and forth from every day, just to help us remember how much fun we had there!

The balcony over one of the courtyards the bordered our apartment.

One of the covered streets on our way--it's this kind of thing that
makes Paris so much fun!

The bakery just down from our apartment.

We crossed this balcony across this little courtyard to reach the stairs up to our apartment.
It was a little rickety, very quaint, and the boys loved it!

Our trip home was almost uneventful...almost!  We had to take the regional train from the metro station to the airport and after we got into the station, we looked around for a ticket machine, but we couldn't find one.  So we assumed we would find a machine on the platform or once we reached the airport station...but there was no machine.  And so when we arrived, we had no tickets...and no way to get out of the train station because we needed a ticket to open the gates.  And it was really early in the morning so there were no attendants on duty...and we were stuck.  And it really looked like we had tried to ride without paying, and I wasn't at all confident that my non-existent French would be able to convince someone otherwise.  I was trying very hard not to panic and praying up a storm when a man wandered over to the gates who looked like he might work maintenance at the airport or something.  I explained that my ticket didn't work and he said for me to come with him through his turnstile, but then I pointed to the rest of the family, so he walked over to the handicapped access gate, crammed us all in the vestibule there, ran his ticket through, and let us into the airport, then turned and walked away without a word.  Merci, our little French angel!

After that trauma, getting on the plane was a cinch.  Lufthansa even gave J a Lego plane to assemble, and E loved the kids' meal (complete with tiny chopped cold potatoes covered in vinegar served with a hard-boiled egg...?).  Our plane flying out had been kind of a disappointing clunker, but we were all mostly sleeping, so it really didn't matter.  Thankfully, our plane back from Frankfurt to Doha was swanky, with a souped up entertainment system and really nice seats even in economy.  We all watched movies (or played with Legos) to our hearts' content and managed to stay awake (though it took some doing with E there at the end--we had to pull out even more Legos, the really big guns, to keep him from sleeping when it was almost 6pm our time) but we made it home, found our car (the husband took a picture of our location, thank goodness), and got home with only one wrong turn (the highways here change on a dime and the way home is always new!).  We were all very excited to be home, but we practically threw the kids into bed because they had to wake up for school the next day--note to self, perhaps a bit more breathing room on the back end of vacations!