Recap: Paris, Day 6: Rest and date night

Thursday started out pretty slow as we were beginning to tire from the constant whirlwind tour. Mom and Jodi decided to take off to a local mall to do some shopping, so me and Dad and the kids went for a walk around the condo:The condo was on a nice little lake and had a decent amount of paths and stuff around it. Erika enjoyed the ducks and we made a date to return to the lake to feed them. When the ladies got back, me and Jodi decided to head into the city for a little date night in Paris. We started at the Parthenon. Jodi was starving by the time we got to the city so she was chomping on some cheese bread for most of the beginning pictures. Here she is posing with it:

The basement houses a crypt where many French notables are buried, including Voltaire and Rousseau, and of course some noble prize winning physicists (Curies):

I really liked the Parthenon, it was an incredibly neat building and so grand that the pictures we took don't do it justice at all. One of the main attractions is Foucault's pendulum, which demonstrates the spinning of the earth. Pretty cool, I think. But I suppose it is just a metal ball on the end of a really long string.

After the Parthenon, Jodi posed outside of the Notre Dame:

Then, of course, we had to make our way to the Moulin Rouge. Oh my, we were in for a real-life nightmare. It looked relatively easy enough from the transit maps to get there, and it turns out it wasn't too hard to find... After taking the metro to a station close to our original arrival point in Paris, we started to walk the remainder of the four or five blocks (or so we thought) to get to our destination. Two blocks into our walk, the only stores that lined the streets were wedding dress shops and junk/thrift stores. We just shrugged it off and continued on our way as things began to get seedier and seedier. By block five, we sincerely thought our lives were in danger. We stood out like sore thumbs as tourists, and the locals were all staring at us, and were congregating in clumps in the middle of roads and alleyways. Imagine all the stereotypes about the ghetto/hood that you can think of, and we were in it. We debated turning around, but we were so far into the thick of it, we figured we could get out easier if we kept going. I honestly thought we might end up rolled up in a rug somewhere. Talk about dumb tourists at the wrong place, and to top it off, it was about dusk too. After sweating bullets and rushing down a couple more blocks, the worst seemed to be behind us. Still no sight of the Moulin Rouge. I tried asking a few people, but no one really seemed to care, except a fellow asking us from the back of his van if we wanted to by some speakers. Just kidding about the speakers part. We kept walking and finally made it to Pigale, the area where the Moulin Rouge is. We quickly snapped some pictures and made our exit back on the nearest metro. Jodi looks pretty white-knuckled in these:

We picked a little restaurant by the river to grab a bite to eat and end off the night. The food was completely nasty but the view was great (Notre Dame over Jodi's shoulder and the Eiffel over mine):

Grrr, I sure look like I am having a good time. After our snack, we went back to the condo, and got another, albeit smaller, scare from the local ghetto the condo seemed to be in. Oh well, we sure slept good that night.

Jeff and Jodi