Yes, I'm sitting here on the patio of our flat watching the Eiffel Tower sparkle. It does that every hour on the hour after dark for five minutes. It's quite neat.
So, it's pretty late, and therefore, I'm going to make this one a short one.
We went to Versailles today. This involved getting train passes to go out to the suburbs (Versailles used to be the hunting lodge for French royalty, and eventually turned into the main palace of Louis the XIVth. Now it's just in the suburbs). Anyway, we had two memorable moments. First was went we got off the Metro at the train station and tried to buy tickets at the automated machine. It had a nice big Visa logo on the machine, but didn't take any credit cards. Nice. Nor did it take "regular" cash. Double nice. Only coins (and we needed almost 20 Euros in tickets). So we walked around and guess what? Banks, or at least all banks, here don't carry coins. They just have ATM machines which dispense cash, not coins. So we ended up buying a bunch of little things at a market and getting the coins we needed. Lame, but memorable!
Versailles was good.* It was very crowded inside. The Hall of Mirrors was outstanding. The gardens were even better. They are just huge, and unending. We walked around some, and then rented a golf cart to explore more. Emma decided that there was going to be a drawing held this year and that the winner would get to live in Versailles (complete with servants) for a year and would get $83 million (which later expanded to $83 million gazillion and then still later "all the money in the world"). She was pretty excited about that.
* The most memorable part of Versailles you ask? Well, let me tell you. That would be when we, not once, but twice, were forced to evacuate the cafeteria because of fire alarms. Crazy.
On the way home we found out another interesting fact regarding France. Restaurants don't open for dinner until 7p. We had walked by an Indian (Indien) restaurant on the way from the train to Versailles, so we returned to have dinner. It didn't open until 7p. It was 5:30p. So we hopped on the train and headed back home (and toward another Indian place we had looked up). We got there at 6:35 p. "Please come back at 7". So we headed across the street to a bakery and had dessert first. Back to the Indian place at 7p. Ate. Headed home with bellies full.
Our other discovery today was these great black out shutters which are helping the kids fall right to sleep tonight!
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