The must-sees and the quirky accidents

Sometimes, a day in Europe can feel like an endless parade of churches and palaces, monuments and museums...especially (if memory serves) if you're on one of those tours with a high school group, the leaders of which should all be sainted, or at least provided with a lifelong supply of Xanax.

We have tried to break things up a little with the kids, but really the only cure for museum fatigue is wandering, and accidentally bumping into weirdness. Also, I have a habit of fixating on themes that are sort of offbeat, and we focus on those as we wander. For example, men in Paris don't just wear blue jeans. Their jeans are orange, green, cobalt blue, red...jeans for which up you'd probably get bullied mercilessly in an American school. Another trend involves the beggars who bring their pets to help them beg; after all, no one wants to help a grimy man, but a lot of people will stop to pet a cute mutt. The most creative of these guys had a rabbit. Who begs with a pet rabbit?

Doors are another oddity in Europe. Some of these old buildings had massive doors, big enough for a horse and rider to go through, so modern architects have simply converted those doors to walls, and cut smaller doors into them; people are always coming out of small doors cut out of big doors, which makes them look like they're in a kids' lift-the-flap book. I find it really baffling that the doors have doorknobs, but the doorknobs do absolutely nothing. They are located in the center of the door. They aren't connected to the door's opening and closing at all. WTF?

And finally, we have been looking for a fountain in Paris that can compare to anything in Barcelona or Rome. We found a relatively small, but lovely one at Saint-Michel...but Parisian officials clearly have decided the Seine is enough water for anyone, and fountains are overkill.

Greg and the kids headed off to the catacombs on Friday morning, trying to get there super-early to avoid waiting in line. They waited 2.5hrs anyway, but they got to climb underneath Paris and see the remains of formerly alive people.  The three of them came back and collapsed for a nap, so I went for a walk in our section of the city. I went down to Notre Dame, which is much nicer than I remembered it, though poor old John the Baptist is still toting his own head in the statue by the left-hand door. I went over the Seine on one of the bridges where people have attached hundreds of padlocks to the fence. It is a thing in Paris to buy a padlock, put your name on it somehow (carving? I dunno), and padlock it to one of these fences over the Seine. I guess this is better than people cutting their names into trees, but it still seems like a sad attempt at immortality.

Later, we all went to the Eiffel Tower, where poor Greg once again had the tough job of keeping up with Nicky, climbing up to the second platform. I've been on the Eiffel Tower and climbing stairs holds no thrill for me, so after Cassie had gone to the first platform and returned, we wandered around the park. The gardens are really quirky here, because they have some humble flowers like marigolds, which no one else puts in these public showcase gardens. There are showy roses everywhere, too, but a lot of the gardens look like something I would put together, which means there are philistines in Paris, too.

After a dinner that included the now-required crepes, we roamed back to our apartment, passing Notre Dame, Hotel d'Ville, and -- bizarrely -- a group of maybe a hundred rollerbladers gathering for a street race. One of them was wearing Christmas lights, and another had neon piping around his outfit. Why there was a rollerblade race at 11pm on a Friday will remain a mystery.

I just hope the pet rabbit wasn't involved.