With A Little Help From Our Friends

 

We wrapped up our time in France with a super fun visit from some Oakland friends!  June (in pink jacket) and Sydney have been fast friends since meeting in the 2nd grade, and Fern (green jacket) and Georgia have become friends as well, with a shared, younger sister mentality. 

We also closed out our time in France with a trip to Chartres, a smaller town an hour out of Paris famous for it's UNESCO Cathedral. The girls enjoyed the slower pace of the town and quaint, small streets. 

Sydney and Tiff made some quiet friends in Chartres.

I think Sydney and Georgia are somewhere in the "Chartres" sign? The ancient cathedral looms in the background.

We loved wandering the old, narrow streets.

A UNESCO World Heritage site, the cathedral was built around 1200, which was pretty much unfathomable to us, realizing that the US is only about 250 years old.

Lots of amazing stained glass.

We visited Musee d'Orsay, one of our favorite Paris museums, with lots of sculptures by Rodin. The museum gave the girls a lot to "think" about...

Musee d'Orsay also has one of the prettiest restaurants in Paris. It was a gorgeous room covered in paintings, chandeliers, and, as the girls pointed out, butts. A real eye for art, these two.

We had a thrilling visit to the Le Grand Rex Theater, where we were treated to a behind the scenes tour of France's most famous theater, with its main theater holding 2,700 people. During the tour, we were directed to act in front of a green screen (above) and later watched ourselves appear on screen in a Titanic/King Kong remake!

We visited Paris' Chinatown for some dim sum and Georgia attempted her best happy Buddha pose.

We found a Polish church in Paris as well!

With our good friends, the Spicers, we braved the underground Paris Catacombes, which hold the remains of more than six million people! There were many whispers from the adults of "I see dead people," that went completely unappreciated by the kids.

You can only stack so many skulls and femurs without making some artistic attempt.

Following a theme of dead people, we then visited the Parthenon, which is the final resting place of some of France's heroes. Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Rousseau are a few of the famous Frenchmen you can find here.

Tiffany and Georgia pay their respects to Marie Curie, the first woman honored with a place in the Pantheon on the basis of her brilliant life's work. She remains the only woman to have won the Nobel Prize twice. 

Now that we had science on our minds, we ventured to the children's science museum. The kids ran around the various exhibits focused on everything from movie making to how our bodies work to water science, seen above with Sydney and Fern.

One of the absolute highlights was finding this park in Paris, which apparently was primarily for dog owners.  We spent two hours watching the girls run around and play with all the dogs and had to drag them out of there.

On our last night in Paris we had dinner with Georgia's good friend, Ina, and her family. Along with a fun evening catching up, we managed to squeeze in one last flower-shaped gelato. From here, we're just a Chunnel-ride away from London. Au revoir Paris!