Museum d’Orsay

(Katherine)  Erika and I decided to spend some quality girl time at the beginning of the day without the boys by shopping at a well known flea market nearby our apartment. It took quite a while to find our way through the cheap t-shirt vendors to find the “good” stuff…old vintage home accessories and furniture. Too bad it would be extremely expensive to ship such goods because we found some wonderful hidden gems.

We cut our shopping trip short to meet up with the boys at Museum d’Orsay, which is actually a beautiful old train station. This museum had a wonderful collection of some of the world’s finest artists, including Van Gogh, Monet and Robert’s favorite, Lautrec. We walked the aisles very thoroughly and marveled at the various painting styles of these artistic geniuses. Upon exiting the museum, Mark was kind enough to help us rent Velib bikes since our American credit cards didn’t work with their system. This is a public bike service where you can temporarily rent bikes out of racks and then return them to another rack whenever you are finished using it; an extremely “green” and healthy mode of transportation. After riding all around Le Marais to gather various food items we finally stopped for a picnic in one of the neighborhood parks. As we dined on our lovely spread, a gentleman walked by and exclaimed to Mark (in French) “my, how lucky you are to have such wonderful strawberries!” To which, of course, we smiled and had to give him some!

We stopped for a cone of France’s best ice cream before we started a long journey southeast towards the far end of the Seine River around Gare de Lyon. Our mission was to attend a boat party called Dance Culture where they were known for their repertoire of deep house music (Erika and Mark’s favorite.) There was a DJ in the dark hull of the boat, but we ended up spending most of our time listening to the DJ on the top deck while enjoying the last bit of sunlight and the warm air. We danced through the early evening before finally Velib biking our way back home - a wonderful way to spend a day with good friends!