SBR in Paris: A Moveable Feast

Today: The Louvre. (or, Da Loovra, as Drake likes to say) Well... it's still huge! And the Mona Lisa...is still small and surrounded by bullet proof glass, Japanese tourists, and lots of other people with cameras (what does one do with a picture of the Mona Lisa?). But the rest of the museum, at least the tiny chunk that we bit off today, is just fantastic. Botticelli, DaVinci, David, unnamed Roman sculptures, I.M. Pei even, one masterpiece after another, and another, and another! But fortunately, our pain au chocolates didn't last too long and we had to retreat to the Tuilleries for a picnic before we imploded with too much art.

Having paid respect to the Louvre, and having four days left, we felt a little bit lighter on our feet and the rest of day was spent reading and napping in various parks and our apartment. We stumbled (literally, on our bikes) upon the English bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, which was started by US expat Sylvia Beach, who published the first edition of Joyce's Ulysses and was a good friend to many of the "Lost Generation" writers in Paris. I needed a new book (just finished Loving Frank--the end? Oh my goodness!! Did not see that coming) and picked up Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, his memoires about his time in Paris in the '20s. It's a really fun read, he writes all about our neighborhood. Anyway, we love this little place!! We have some rain in the forecast and would love to spend an afternoon there.

One thing we're trying to do is not eat at anymore restaurants with any English in the menu...and it's proven to be harder than we thought, both to find these restaurants (most are still closed for August; hello France, it's basically September today) and to then translate the French menu. But we had a wonderful meal tonight at Bistro Mazarin in the 6th arrondisement, with a fun but chic local feel and our first pommes frites of the trip! And then for the 2nd night in a row we went to Ile Saint Louis searching for crepes and came up empty handed! But this time we had ice cream instead, from Berthillon, the first "glacée" in France. YUM.