Paris, Day 17: Rick Steves' Paris and Rollerblading!

This morning I was up and out early, headed off to Notre Dame to run through Rick Steves' audio tour of Paris. Yes, I grabbed a McBreakfastSandwich along the way. Cut me some slack; it was just 3€ and came with a cafe au lait.

After a walk along the left bank (orientation:  the Seine runs west to east with the left bank being to the south), by Shakespeare and Company, Saint Severin Cathedral and Saint Michel, I was positioned on the Pont Neuf (Paris' oldest bridge) to walk back across to the Right Bank and down to a very cool wooden pedestrian bridge. It's a wide bridge comprised of skinny wood slat planks and benches running down its center; on one side is the Louvre and on the other is the Institute de France, and it's just cool. From it's midsection, you can look to the east for a view of pointed tip of Ile de Cite on which lies Notre Dame and Saint Chapelle.

So I'm on this bridge, right? And as I'm walking from the Louvre end to the Institute of France end, I take note of a pink-clad Asian woman sitting cross-legged on the planks of the bridge.  She is handing her young son - let's say he's about five years old - her mobile phone so that he can walk a few feet away from her and take this great shot of her sitting there with the Institute de France in the background. So, ok, I silently judge her for that which is wrong because it's not like I haven't gotten my kids to take photos of me in a cool spot. Noted.

But so I'm standing a little ways away when I hear her let out a distressed scream (is there any other kind?) and I look over to see the panicked mom in front of the kid who is sitting on the planks without the aforementioned phone, and the mom has this crazy horrified look on her face and is crying out in a language I don't know as she repeatedly looks into the spaces between the planks where at this point it is clear that the kid has dropped the phone, as though she could draw the lost device from the depths of the Seine with the power of her mind and her wildly panicked eyes.

So let that be a lesson to you, friends. 

It's like 1:30 when I get everyone out of the apartment to see whether we're going to get to rollerblade Paris, today. That's right! Every Friday and Sunday, a Parisian rollerblading club, in concert with the local authorities, coordinates the very temporary, section by section closing of an entire 20 kilometer (in this case) route through the city. It all begins at Nomades, the bike, blade, skate rental shop in the Place de Bastille, where we outfit ourselves with skates and, at 2:30 pm on Sundays, we take to the streets. "Let my people go skating!"

Griffin is a crazy good rollerblader, even in this pack of pros; Rowan is strong and competitive enough to want to be toward the front of the pack; but Berit is just j-chillin, and what we don't realize is that first of all, you've got to keep up a certain pace to stay in the pack. They're only keeping sections of the route open for so long, so it's imperative you don't get behind, or you will be left behind. And secondly, they happen to be running at a particularly fast pace this Sunday. 

We take off from the Place de Bastille, and I notice instantly that people are cruising by me. I wouldn't have been a speedster by any means, but I'm slowing myself way down because Berit is behind me, and I'm not interested in leaving any of my kids behind. It's more important for me to enjoy the thing with the kids than to be at the front of the pack. Recall, we don't realize at this point that it's imperative that we go fast.

Before long, a man skating past me says something to me in French. Je ne comprende pas, I reply. You're the last person, he tells me. And I turn and look back and, sure enough, I see the ambulances that are bringing up the rear of the pack, and I also  see that the rear of the pack is now comprised of just Berit. And me. 

Berit felt bad about the turn of events. There's no doubt she could have kept up had we understood how the game worked, but there was no catching up after that, and so we pressed eject and skated our way back to l'appartement. After getting our other shoes and making our way back to Place de Bastille, we did find have a fun outing of our own - happening on a cool architecture and transportation exhibit at Pavillion de l'Arsenal.

The whole top floor seems to have to do with the Tower of Montparnasse which, it seems, is the only skyscraper in Paris, built (perhaps?) in the early 1970s and (perhaps?) related somehow to the company, CIT. Not sure, but this level was full of architectural/civil engineering proposals designed to improve the situation. Weirdly, Gigi was talking to us about this skyscraper yesterday.

When they got back to the skate shop, Rowan and Griffin regaled us with stories of their two and a half hour skate odyssey du Paris - Griffin's involved being picked up (literally) by another expert skater. On the way home, we stopped in the Republique square where a festival and a Burber/Algerian protest ensued. At least this was what Griffin and I gathered from Idya, the young Algerian man we spoke with after Griffin played a chess game there.

On the way home, we met the girls and Bennett who had stopped at O'Taco which was about as bad as it sounds.