"In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor. Nobody is content to be a spectator." - Jean Cocteau

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This morning it was raining, so we got out a bit late & managed to avoid getting wet. We took the metro over to the Marche aux Puces (flea market) and wandered around for a long time. It was pretty overwhelming -- imagine a neighborhood's worth of flea market stalls. One stall had a basket full of baby rabbits and when I stopped to play with them, the guy who was selling them started yelling at me in French about how healthy they were and how they would live 16-20 years. After that, we stopped in a bakery to grab some quiches for lunch and climbed the hill in Montmartre up to Sacre Coeur. We ate in the gardens and then walked into the cathedral. It was absolutely incredible. You weren't supposed to take pictures inside, so I didn't, but we did climb all the way up to the top on a very narrow, very winding stone staircase and I took lots of pictures from the domed top. The church is on the highest point in Paris, so the views are spectacular. We also walked around in the crypt, which was a bunch of rooms around a cylindrical stone wall that had a picture and description of each of the stations of the cross... Which, having been raised Protestant, I didn't really know anything about until then. After Sacre Coeur, we took the Metro over to Ile de la Cite to see Notre Dame, which was also magnificent. Photos were also technically not allowed, but everyone else was doing it, so I took a few. Then we wandered back across the Seine, up through the Latin Quarter and over to Luxembourg Gardens. The gardens around the Louvre are a close second, but I can see why Luxembourg is Parisians' favorite park (so says my mother's guidebook - I guess take that with a grain of salt, since I didn't actually canvas them myself.) My mom swooned over the flowers for a while and then we wandered into a little Italian restaurant for dinner, which was delicious. Our feet were killing us by the end of all this, but it was way too early to call it a night, so we wandered back up the side streets to the Pantheon and had drinks and ice cream at a little creperie - unfortunately, we were both too full for crepes, but we'll get around to those soon! So everything's been pretty wonderful so far, depsite jet lag and tired feet. And we still have 3 days left in Paris!

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Photos

Sacre Coeur
Definitely up there with prettiest things I've seen in Paris... And my life.

Me & TEEENY Eiffel Tower
On top of Sacre-Coeur -- if you look, you can see the tower just to the right of my head...

Un Chat de Paris
Cat sleeping in the window of a closed restaurant... Totally random, but cute.