Visiting Albi Part 2 - Albi Activities

On to part 2!  What did we do after driving and cycling to Albi?  

Of course, the first order of business was lunch.  Dan desired some calories.  We also try to keep the kids fed so that they are less grumpy during historic-type activities.  We looked for one of the closest places that was also tasty.  We found a French restaurant called, Le Papillion.  Why choose this one?  One of the reviews on google said that the proprietors were friendly and tolerated customers speaking terrible French.  WE speak terrible French!  In the world of restaurant preferences, we prefer when people let us try to speak French instead of immediately handing us a touristy menu written in English.  We also prefer friendly restaurateurs to those that treat tourists as an irritation and only give good service to locals.

The restaurant was great!  We got French menus, the waiter was super nice and patient.  The food was delicious.  However, the boys decided not to appreciate the food.  We ordered Alex some steak hache, or hamburger without a bun.  He tried it, but that was about it.  We didn't bother ordering Will food.  We told them that when we were finished with lunch, we would get bagels at the place we passed by on the walk in.  However, as meals move slowly in France, the kids continued to get more and more anxious and hungry.  So, we stayed and ate our food.  We gave the kids some euros and sent them on their own to find bagels.  

It wasn't far.  We explained that it was basically a loop.  They just had to keep turning to the right to get to the bagel store and back to us.  It was a win-win!  We got to peacefully eat our food.  The kids got to do something interesting on their own.  We did get slightly concerned, of course.  After a bit of time passed and we were getting worried and about to send out a search, the kids returned with their bagels.  Will got a bagel with cream cheese.  Alex got a bagel with Nutella.  The restaurant let them eat their bagels acquired elsewhere at the table with us while we ordered coffee and desert.

Yummy Cream Cheese

Nutella, it's for lunch as well as breakfast

Post lunch, we headed over to the Sainte Cecile Cathedral.  

It's Gothic

The inside was ornate and well-decorated.

Tessellations

The kids weren't super impressed by the inside of the cathedral.  I'm not quite sure what to tell them to encourage them to take an interest in things that were built in the 12th and 13th centuries. Perhaps prior to our next cathedral visit, I will invest some time in creating an art scavenger hunt.  

Next, we headed over to the Toulouse-Lautruc museum.  However, we opted out of the museum visit itself as most of Toulous-Lautruc's art tends towards being a bit gritty.  He painted a lot of art with brothel themes.  Sure, we take the kids to museums that have traditional art of unclothed subjects.  We explained that creating art that depicts the realistic human body is difficult and therefore a challenge to artists.  Will's solution to the problem of realistic sculptures is that instead of cutting a figure out of marble, we scan a person and use a 3d printer to produce a completely accurate, realistic form.  

Toulouse-Lautrec Museum

Painting on the side of the museum showing people in a museum

Fortunately, the museum used to be a palace and also has some lovely gardens to experience. 

The gardens you can look at from above, but not go into

Looking down at the gardens

Proof that we were all there together!

As you can tell, there were also great views of the city from the gardens.

The tower you see behind us

The nifty bridge

The palace itself

Bridge and City

Overall, the trip to Albi was both interesting and painfully full of children's whining.  We hope that we can find better ways for them to enjoy historical things.  And, we hope to find a babysitter and head back to Albi to visit the museum without the kids.

Visiting Albi Part 1 - Getting to Albi

We visited the town of Albi, France.  It is primarily known for being the location of the Toulouse-Lautrec museum and the Saint Cecile Cathedral.  Albi is located about 80 kilometers northeast of Toulouse.  The kids and I drove.  Dan bicycled.  Here is his journey as well as I can reconstruct it from Facebook and his humorously titled Strava trip, "Le Trek Toulouse - Toulouse-Lautrec."  Get it?  Because he started his journey in Toulouse and went to the city known for Toulouse-Lautrec.  Yup.

In a normal occurrence, Dan departed our place before I woke up.  This was probably before 7am.  I'm not sure.  Like I said, I was peacefully enjoying sleep.  Ultimately, it took him 5 hours to make it to Albi.  However, this wasn't 5 hours to go 80 kilometers.  No, this was 5 hours to go 80 miles.  Because bicycles are not allowed on expressways, he took a more "fun" route.  

Fun Times

After bicycling for a while, Dan took a break around 9:30am at Foret de Gresigne to take this picture of the beautiful countryside.  All of the countryside near us is beautiful.  

Break time. Lost in France.

Then he biked a bunch of elevation to take this hilltop view at the not-ironically titled, Le Panoramique, around 10am.  It is at Cordes Sur Ciel.  Ciel is french for Sky.

Hill top city view

On the way out of town, he captured another view of the city, which was tricky to get with the camera.  But still cool.  

Lord of the Rings come to life

Fortunately he was able to get a good shot of the sky city from a more distant perspective.

Cordes Sur Ciel

After some more riding, Dan arrived in Albi around noon where we met up.  

Albi

It took us a little over an hour to drive to Albi.  For Dan, we brought the bike rack so that he could hang out with us and get a lift home.  But 80 kilometers instead of 80 miles this time!

Strange Happenings In France - Parking Incident

We took a day-trip to Albi.  On the way back, we stopped by the Gaillac Wine festival.  Basically, there were a bunch of tiny wooden house booths set-up in a park.  You pay 5 euro and can try the wine from any of the booths.  If you like it, you can buy the bottles right there.  One of the neat things about these types of festivals is that you can find local wine you like that costs only about 4-6 euro per bottle. 

Even a Pirate Wine Booth

Because we were at a park, we could send the kids over to either sit on a boring bench or to play on the playground.  They selected the playground.  This way we could try wine without Alex the pinball bouncing between us.  

The strange happening wasn't related to the festival, but was rather before we got to the festival.  We needed to find a place to park.  Dan researched and figured out that we were allowed to park in a space with blue dashes marking it.  Then we had to display some sort of dial that showed when we would return.  Because the festival was going on, we had a hard time finding parking.  Plus, we had the bike rack attached to our car, so we needed a fairly large spot if we wanted to successfully get into it.  Finally, we found a spot that had blue dashes, but it also had yellow dashes.  We pulled in to google what that meant.  It wasn't too difficult to fit into the space, so no problem getting in.  

As we were contemplating the blue-yellow dashes, the car in front of us started backing up.  This was ok as we were in a large space.  But, oddly, it kept backing up.  So, I honked the horn.  But no, it kept coming.  Fortunately it was moving slowly.  So when it hit us, it was quite mild.  Plus, I put the car in neutral so that we moved slightly when it hit.  

Concerned that we now had a weird accident issue on our hands, but hopeful no damage had been done by the low impact bumper bump, we waited for the driver of the other car to get out.  But there was no driver!  The car had simply rolled back into us, perhaps brought on by the vibration of our car parking near it.  

UM..........

Now what?

Silly Twingo without a driver

The little Twingo was right on our bumper.  If we backed up, it would roll back further.  But we still hadn't figured out if we could even park in the blue-yellow spot.  So we sat on a bench and googled.  Waiting patiently for someone to show up.  Perhaps a friendly police officer would find us and be able to answer both of our questions.  The one about parking in blue-yellow and the one about what to do with the Twingo.  

Out of nowhere, someone came up to the stuck car, got in, and drove away.  No words to us, but hey, our problem was solved.  We were able to escape the parking spot and go to an alternate location where we could park properly and alone in our space.

It was one of those moments when we just had no idea how to handle the situation.  Fortunately, waiting patiently is usually effective.  

Awesome Things in France - Bread

The bread in France is excellent. And comes in different versions. The most commonly thought of is the baguette. But there are flutes, campagnettes, brioches, croissants, and many others. 

Cutting bread is not something most people contemplate as an issue of the day. But we contemplate it much during our mass consumption of bread. Normal cutting boards have this problem if you cut lots of bread.

Crumbs Accumulate on top of the board

Here, the good designers at IKEA have come up with this bread cutting board with integrated knife storage. 

Crumbs captured under the surface of the board

One aspect of our massive bread consumption in France is that the boys are now allowed to use the bread knife. They have developed advanced bread cutting skills and have lost no fingers yet.

In our prior US based model of bread consumption, we ate many bagels. Our bagel consumption was so prevalent that we had basically given up buying sliced bread, opting to purchase dozens of bagels at Costco instead. This led to Will's invention of the leaning tower of bagel. This epic creation involves a bagel topped with scrambled eggs, a sausage patty, and acacado slices. The avacado slices give the bagel sandwich its leaning quality. 

We have tried to duplicate this food architecture here in France. Unfortunately it is difficult. The kids have determined that they don't care for the common preparation of sausage here. It is a bit too corse for their liking. The avocados never seem to be ripe at the time we like.\

And bagels!  They are difficult to acquire here.  If you buy them from the bread section of the grocery store, they aren't really bagels.  They resemble bagels in that they are round shaped bread with a hold in the middle.  We do have a few bagel stores around including Bagelstein and Brugger's.  Bagelstein tends to allow us to buy bagels on their own and take them home.  Brugger's initially told us that it was not possible and that we had to order individual bagel sandwiches, not plain bagels.  But finally, after asking a few times, Brugger's came up with this:

Take Bagels Home!?!

The first time I tried to order it, the bagel girl looked at me in confusion.  I had to point to the sign a bunch to get her to understand what I liked and say, "emporter a la maison" or something similar.  It was just not a concept that was common here.  

In actuality, we have given up, for the most part, on acquiring bagels and are quite happy with our massive campagnette consumption.  Plus, the bread delivery guy is kind of cute:)

Is that a campagnette in your jersey?

First Visit To Paris!

For our first week of summer vacation, the boys and I went to Paris.  If you know the boys, you would know that they would prefer to stay home and play video games.  If they could do that all summer and never venture out of the house, they would be miserable, but they would think they were happy.  So, there were a few tactics that I took to help them enjoy their first experience traveling around.  The primary tactics were: let them use electronics on the train, rent an apartment with a pool, avoid standing in long lines, and set expectations ahead of time about what we were going to do and see.

Actually, this is our second trip within Europe as a whole.  In February we visited London.  I'll do another post about that trip soon.  But, to get them enjoying the pattern of traveling around us, the trip to Paris was important to set the mood.  Who knows, maybe some day one of them will suggest a trip.  That is, they might come up with an additional trip suggestion.  They have proposed one already.  They would like to go to Sorrento, Italy in search of the alleged hot pizza vending machine.  As Hillary has just visited Sorrento and tried to track it down (unsuccessfully), I feel that they boys need to branch out a bit in their trip planning.  In any case, back to the Paris trip.

Day 1: Travel by Train

PARIS!  It's the world's top tourist destination.  And we got to visit it.  To get from Toulouse to Paris, we took the train.  We signed up with the SNCF train child discount card for each kid.  This gave us half price tickets for the boys and a discount on my ticket as a person accompanying a minor.  It normally costs 75 euro for the discount card, but the day I got them there was a sale so they were only 60 euro each.  Completely worth it!  The trip duration was about the same as it would be to drive, about 6 hours.  Convincing the kids was easy, I told them that instead of staying inside at home to play with their electronics, they would have an outlet and a comfy seat on a train from which to engage in electronics use.

Will with iPad and Alex with DS

  

We didn't play with electronics for the entire journey.  We also used the nifty tables to play Star Fluxx.  And Will decided to rest his chin.

The table is for chin resting

Rest your chin.  I will photobomb!

The best part about riding the train for me was that I didn't have to drive for 6 straight hours, I got to sit on the train and relax.  This involved having some wine with lunch, taking a nap, and crushing Alex in foosball/babyfoote.  Yes, there was a table on board.  It was a little more challenging because when the train turned, the ball tended to go toward one of the goals.  Alex called it the "gravity advantage."

Considering crushing Alex in babyfoote

The train trip was really smooth and other than picking the wrong train car and therefore the wrong seats (oops). We made it without too much trouble.  The boys were not interested in the sandwiches on board, so we decided to bring our own for the return trip.

We managed to get to Paris, take the metro, find our Air B and B, and get the keys.  Upon entry to the apartment, the boys immediately found the computer and realized that they were able to play "English Games" on it such as slither.io.  Ah, the ubiquitous internet.  After our initial orientation, we headed out to get some food supplies.  We found a grocery store and a bakery, then returned to our apartment for dinner.

Day 2: Paris Overview

None of us had ever been to Paris.  We figured we would start by going to see the Eiffel Tower.  We grabbed the boys' scooters, hopped on the metro, and headed toward La Tour.  

Normally there is a long park that you can go to on one side of the tower.  You can get great shots of the entire height of the tower.  However, due to the football that was in progress, Euro 2016, it had been converted into a "fan zone" and was closed off until it was time to assemble for the game that evening.

Also, there is a giant football in the Tower during Euro 2016

We went over to that side where we saw the long line for day-of entry and the non-existent line for reservations.  We opted to return to Paris at a future date after booking tower reservations so that we could avoid the line.  

Crazy Line Behind Us

Next, we decided that it would be a good plan to find a restroom for a break.  However, due to the fan zone craziness and the general lack of public toilets in Paris, we were not very successful.  We ended up at Cafe Le Dome which is a little bit of a walk away from the Tower.  I ordered the breakfast which was a croissant, coffee, and orange juice for 9 euro.  I also ordered the boys orange juice which came in at over 5 euro each.  So check on experiencing tourist trap and paying more than 20 euro to use the restroom.  

As this was our first visit and I wanted the boys to get an idea of what Paris had to offer overall, we decided to extend our touristy experience and hopped on one of the double decker, open top, audio included tour buses.  It took quite a long time, but we got to see all sorts of stuff with interesting commentary.

Dome des Invalides, Tomb of Napoleon

The Rodin Museum was on the tour.  We didn't stop or go in, but were treated to what the boys thought was a very funny view of The Thinker.

I think I see his butt!

As Le Tour de France was occurring and the end of it still coming up, the Champs Elysees was nearly prepared for the finish.  There were bleachers setup and the large bulletin board with cyclist and expensive watch advertisement.

Dan wants to go to here

One of the interesting features of France is that there are guidelines issued about what is acceptable in the language and what is to be rejected.  For example, you shouldn't use the phrase, "Bon Week-end!" to wish someone a good weekend.  Not that people avoid this phrase.  But, the Academie Francaise issues the guidelines anyway from their beautiful building in Paris.

Academie Francaise

Paris is a city of monumental buildings.  We also saw the Cathedral of Notre Dame which took over a century to build.  

It's on an island

We opted to end our bus tour at the Arc de Triomphe.  Primarily because we were meeting friends from California there.  After arriving, we realized that it was in the center of a roundabout. With no crosswalks.  We called our friends and they told us the secret that you cross underneath the roundabout by going down some stairs.  

How do we get to the center of the traffic circle?

We met up for lunch, then headed over to the Luxembourg gardens which was beautiful and relaxing.  They have playgrounds, a puppet show, and a beautiful fountain.

After the adventures of the day, we returned to our apartment where the boys took advantage of the available pool.  They had to wear swim caps for the first time.  Pool attire rules are different here in France.  Because, hygiene.

Not tired from wandering around Paris?  Pool!

We grabbed sushi for dinner at a nearby restaurant and watched a bit of football on TV.  Every time France would score, you could tell by the cheering from around the neighborhood.  This meant that I could mute the match on TV and let the kids sleep without extra noise.  Fortunately they slept through the external ambient cheering.  

Day 3: Notre Dame and Modern Art

Day 3 started out a little unsuccessfully.  We tried to go to the Jardin D'Acclimatation. However, when we got there, they told us that the kids couldn't bring in their scooters.  They also didn't have the ability to check the scooters.  The previous day I had carried the bike lock around with me all day and never needed it.  This day, I forgot to bring it.  So, we walked and scooter-ed in the lovely wooded area outside the park.  Then we headed to meet-up for lunch with California friends again.  This time, the meeting place was Notre Dame.  

Amazing Architecture

That's a lot of stone sculptures

While waiting to meetup, I inquired of the boys, "How many stone sculptures do you think are on the front of the Cathedral?  I went to a nearby vendor to get some sandwiches.  Upon my return, Will informed me that there were 432.  

We went to the park behind the cathedral to eat our sandwiches.

Park Behind the Cathedral

Ever on the lookout for spinning disks, the boys spent quite a bit of time playing on the spinning disk nearby and also doing some climbing on the other thing.

Spinning Disk

The other thing

Filled with food and fun, we split ways with our friends and walked over to the Pompidou Center. It is a place that I have always wanted to go.  There was a picture of it on the front of my high school french book.


Getting kids involved in museums makes the trip better for the adults on the trip too.  It's a tricky thing to do, but there is a great book that gives practical advice called "The Gallery and Museum Survival Guide for Parents."  The boys and I had talked about going to see some art before our trip and during the trip.  They were interested to see some art of artists who they knew and also those they had recently studied.  Prior to coming to France, they were familiar with Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, and Renee Magritte.  Since arriving in France they had studied some more about Matisse and Magritte.  So, we knew we would see some works by these artists.

We started out at the infamous fountain, and then walked by a Calder sculpture on our way in.

Will contemplating:  If I could just go INTO the fountain, that would be great!

American Art!

We were able to successfully check the scooters at the coat check.  And we only needed to buy a ticket for me since kids 18 and under are free.  To get started, we rode up all of the escalators to the 5th floor of the Center.

View from the top

The kids really seemed to like this fountain, coming back to it multiple times.  It has a Max Ernst sculpture in the middle of it of what looks like a mermaid bull family.

Capricorne

We found the Matisse cutouts room that Alex's teacher this year told him about.

Different than the ones at LACMA

Escaping from the Cutouts

We found a Picasso exhibit that was inspired by Mrs. Picasso.

We found some cool Magritte paintings.

Le double secret

The Red Model

Will contemplated many pieces of art.

Hmmm...  Shadows.

Hmmm... Optical Illusion

Alex also contemplates

Is it moving?

Hmm... Impossible Object?

After lots of interesting and sometimes bazarre art, we headed back to our apartment to meet friends for dinner.  We took takeout back to the apartment from a restaurant that they boys saw as we got off the metro upon our initial arrival in Paris.... PFC.  Paris Fried Chicken.  


Day 4: Another Park and Departure

On day 4, we found a really awesome park called Parc de Villette.  We visited two playgrounds.  One was the Jardin du Dragon which had a sculpture/play structure shaped like a dragon with an 80 foot tongue slide.
  

Alex trapped in the dragon's throat

Tongue Slide descending 

The other park was called the "Jardin des vents et des dunes" which means the garden of wind and dunes.  It had turf covered hills which the boys raced up and down.  It also had nifty kid sized hamster wheels.

Run Children!  Run!

Also included were some fun zip lines.

Zip!

After some fun at the park, we headed over to the store and boulangerie to get sandwich meat and bread for the return trip.  Then we went to the train station, found the correct train-car-and-seats, then headed home.

We had a fun time and will return to Paris sometime in the future.  Maybe we will take Dan the next time.