Sunday

We slept late, had some peaceful lazy breakfast at home and set out to finish off the last of Paris obligatory attractions - Bastille and such.

Just to warm up, we lost Irene while boarding the train. Miraculously, we met at the next station and arrived at Bastille otherwise intact. From there, we followed a guidebook to Carnavalet - a small but excellent museum of history of Paris. Obscure but full of great paintings and other artifacts spanning the city's entire art history it was especially good for two reasons: it was free and empty. The room attendants were visibly bored, so the view of Max in his hat greatly entertained them. One of the attendants thought that Max was wearing the "Michael Jackson" hat in the memory of the late pop-idol. The guy turned some music on his cell phone and taught Max the moonwalk, the hand and other Jackson's classics. In return, Max showed him some provocative hip and pelvis moves. We pretended that the kid was not ours.

After the museum, the book directed us through "Jews and Gays" quarters (first the Jews, then the Gays). Some world-famous shaurma and falafel stand in the Jewish quarter had a 50-people deep line. It felt good than neither of us liked none of this food. But it made Max remember that he hadn't eaten in a couple of hours, so soon thereafter we stopped for lunch.

Strategizing what to do next, Leon suggested that we should rent bikes (the municipal bike rent stands are all over the city, but you need some preregistered card). We found only one bike shop on the other side of the city, went there and saw the last two bikes rented by people walking into the place right in front of us. Poor Leon - it was like he knew it was going to happen - he tried to speed us up all alone. We didn't even give Leon a luxury of saying "I told you so", because Max started to get cranky again and we had to hassle to get him into a shade and give him some soda.

While Leon and I were in a rush to take care of Max we lost Irene again. Another $5 transatlantic call reunited the family. And Max wanted to pee again. This time, after considerable walking around, we found no bathroom and had to surrender and park for lunch-and-pee at a bistro.

From there, we took a metro to La Defense - Paris business district with Grand Arch and some outdoor Jazz Festival in progress. I liked its clean and wide open space and streamlined modern design. But clean wide open spaces means more walking, which was not how Max envisioned the evening. Back on the metro to a dirty and crowded Champs-Elysees, picked up a burger and some provisions for breakfast and came back home.

Tomorrow morning we are departing Paris for Nice.