Fall Break: Paris

Has anyone else had this feeling of posting past happy moments when feeling crummy or in a funk, ie sick? It's a strange disconnect. Not rushing, but dragging, even slouching, to share news.

Well, here goes. We took the TGV bullet train to Paris (3.5 hours from Lausanne) and enjoyed several days at an apartment right across from the Eiffel Tower, which lights up at night and even does a sparkly light show every hour. The kids were entranced.
Jack has discovered chocolate in a big way. There is some law about a bakery always being open on every block, so Parisians can always have fresh bread. That's one I can live with. I know Japanese are fanatical about having fresh rice, so it's not so strange to have baguettes and croissants always onhand. I scoured our neighborhood daily for bakeries and found one that completely knocked me out. The main difference, it seems to me, with America is the volume of constant production. This allows the shops to stack and arrange their morsels literally from floor to ceiling in a really great presentation, rather than sparsely have them sitting in a basket for the occasional purchase; for people like me, these shops take on the flavor of fantasy.
The Louvre was not crowded and Michael loved finding paintings he had studied with Ariana on Monday mornings, while Jack had therapy back in CA. I would hurry Michael through the exhibits, but he'd tell me to slow down. He really liked the paintings and this museum trip was rewarding.
Even the ceilings were pretty. It was interesting to see so many paintings of what we now call "religious" themes - Michael would say, "There's Jesus" - and ruminate about a time when that was our symbolic cultural capital - not media.
The glass pyramid was the coolest musuem entrance we'd ever seen. You descended down into this cavern, then break out in several directions.
Food heaven. Italian deli.

We also had a life lesson thrown in there, as Michael saw the dead pigeons and rabbits in the case.
The last day we took the boys to a science museum, with a hands-on demo of how flour is milled and bread made (surprise), but loads of other stations, too.
This chocolate shop had a wall of castings as decor.
Wanted to see the Art Nouveau interior of the Galerie Lafayette department store, which was a mistake, since Christmas gawkers turned it into a nightmare.
There is this book, Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth-Century by Walter Benjamin, that makes perfect sense to me now. The city is a tribute to modern urban planning minus the distinctive skyscrapers that dominate American cityscapes, so that grand old structures anchor a vast area, lending a calculated feeling. The lack of a medieval section - normally resulting in interesting, cumbersome neighborhoods for European cities - really marks Paris, as the past was literally bulldozed away to create the vast avenues to organize mass crowds (and to more effectively squelch political demonstrations) and to lay tribute to industry and commerce (Eiffel Tower, shopping palaces), as in the world expos - the predescessor to the modern Olympic movement, where trained bodies, not mass-produced wares, display national culture.