With Kids: Week Two in Paris

With the start of our second week in Paris (click here for Week One) came the realisation that we had just seven days left to do everything we wanted to do. Phone calls were made to book kids’ ateliers (workshops) and battles ensued with various websites – the Eiffel Tower for starters – that insisted on printing out e-tickets (not handy if you’re staying in apartment rather than hotel).

Saturday
It had been the highlight of the kids’ last trip to Paris and three years on the Kapla Centre still enthralled. Several thousands wooden bricks and a couple of hours later, they’d built the Eiffel Tower. Next up was a 2.5km walk from the 11th arrondissement to Parc de Bercy for a picnic in the park and gad around what must be one of the city’s most inventive green spaces – a decade ago warehouses filled with wine marked the spot. Anyone mad about design will love it.

Sunday
Someone had told me that the climbing frames and playgrounds in the Parc Floral de Paris, a flower park in the Bois de Vincennes, were among Paris’ best. So it was with an extra big skip in their step that the boys trekked off that morning. The thrill in Niko’s voice when he told me that evening how he’d got to the top of a spider frame intended for kids 11-plus said it all. He’s eight.

Monday
The day when many Paris museums are shut: This time around they actually made it into the Natural History Museum where, much to the boys amusement, Papa @Luefkens strode unabashedly into the women’s loos to change the baby: the concept of equally equipping both men’s and women’s loos with changing mat has yet to reach France (unlike in Switzerland: just last weekend we were at Lausanne’s Olympic Museum where, yes, @Luefkens sighted a changing-mat in the mens).

Post picnic in Jardin des Plantes, it was a funicular ride up to the street entertainers, buskers and artists of Montmartre. Avoid spending €30 on a portrait unless you’re happy for it to bear zero resemblance to your child (unfortunately our three-month-old daughter was wearing blue that day … she was clealy unimpresed with the result).

Tuesday
Striving for a cheap morning, the gang rode the metro as far as Bastille then spent the morning walking along the banks of Canal St-Martin to the Cité de la Musique (where the boys were enrolled in afternoon music-discovery workshops). The canal walk was superb: within seconds of spotting the first canal boat navigate one of many locks the kids – initially horrified at the idea of ‘a walk’ – were hooked. Dinner at Les Pâtes Vivantes, 22 blvd St-Germain, was a spell-binding affair thanks to the chef behind glass who hand-pulled Chinese noodles while we dined.

Wednesday
They had scaled it twice before already, but the Eiffel Tower is one of those irresistible Parisian icons. With a pram in tow, e-tickets were purchased for the lift. (Smartphones owners note, @luefkens didn’t print out the tickets and yes, the guy at the entrance did successfully scan the bar code on his Blackberry.) From the handsome height of 324m the boys plummeted below-ground level to the city sewers aka Paris’ rather stinky Musée des Agouts. Four million rats live down there but the boys didn’t spot one.

Goûter was another rather stylish affair: the kids’ culinary workshop at Palais de Tokyo’s ArtHome (in French pronounced ‘arôme’ meaning ‘aroma’) climaxed with the boys eating their afternoon’s work – a silky-smooth panna cotta spiced with fresh mint, served in a bowl made of chocolate and decorated with orange-flavoured meringue sticks. Chic.

Thursday
The boys enjoyed the art workshops at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs but what really tickled their fancy was the 16th-century Ecole de Fontainebleau painting their father introduced them to in the Louvre. Being the savvy Dad he is, he knew Mona Lisa just does nothing for six- and eight-year-old boys – unlike the two nipple-pinching ladies the pair of them have been talking about ever since. Do the same if you want your children to actually remember the world’s most famous art museum. Post-Louvre, watch the kids play hide-and-seek in the boxed hedges of Jardin des Tuileries over tea or champagne on the lawn at unforgettable stylish address Le Saut du Loup.

Friday
La Grande Arche in Paris’ spacey La Défense business district was today’s culture box, followed by a frolic in yet another park – Parc André Citroen – and pizza al fresco on the terrace at kid-friendly Restaurant Fiori. Final treat of the week was dinner en famille at L’Entrepot, a edgy cultural centre with restaurant, live bands, film screenings (including monthly parent and baby showings) and a leafy back garden to die for.

With Kids: Week One in Paris

Disneyland Paris would have been an easy cop-out, but with husband @luefkens juggling a three-month-old baby alongside two six- and eight-year-old boys, the Parisian land of stomach-swirling rides and over-sized mice was simply not on.

No bother. With Parisian metro artfully mastered first day (no mean feat given the dozens of staircases – if you can’t handle your pushchair independently take the bus), the city of light, love and 101 ways to woo children was his oyster.

Saturday
No afternoon is better to mingle with Paris families than this. The city’s mythical Jardin du Luxembourg is where they frolic between fountains, flirt with ball games (footie, volleyball, tennis, boules …) or simply flop with a good read on a signature sage-green chair. Sailing a 1920s toy boat on the ornamental pond in front of the Palais du Luxembourg – a childish tradition much-loved since 1922 – is a charm-loaded Parisian classic.

Sunday
It has none of the romance of the Eiffel Tower, but the view from the 56th floor of the Tour Montparnasse – the perfect crowd-dodger – is not bad – and you can see the Eiffel Tower! Back on ground level (well, not quite …) the kids ran riot in the Jardin Atlantique, a rooftop park secreted on top of Montparnasse train-station – another perfect crowd-dodger. Reach it via the metal staircase next to platform No 1.

Monday
With many Paris museums shut Monday, the boys set their sights on ancient Rome in the shape of 2nd-century Roman amphitheatre Les Arènes de Lutèce. They ran and ran and ran in the vast oval, then made a beeline for the world’s second-oldest zoo in the Left Bank’s Jardin des Plantes. Menagerie done, more beasts dead-not-alive awaited them in the Natural History Museum’s Grande Galerie de l’Evolution (open Mon). But they got so lost in the park’s labyrinth they never quite made it. Lunch was an easy child-friendly walk from the Jardin des Plantes to Le Jardin des Pâtes, a creative pasta restaurant at 4 rue Lacépède (5e) no kid could possibly dislike.

Tuesday
The boys have yearned to return to the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie ever since first experiencing it a couple of years back. Of course we hadn’t thought to make an advance reservation for the kids workshops (all full). Nor had we thought to pack a picnic (food in the centre is pricey and poor). So a humble promise was made to return later in the week and the boys bounced the day away in Parc de Villette’s many playgrounds – easily Paris’ best – instead. Goûter for €36 was a real treat, as was dinner at Casa Bini, 36 rue Grégoire de Tours, 6e, where Italian waiters had the kids eating out of their hand in less than 10 seconds flat.

Wednesday
The boys being boys went bananas over the dinosaur exhibition, La Faim des Dinosaures, at the Palais de la Découverte: the animated monsters could not fail to impress. Then it was a merry dash to the Centre Pompidou for a recycling art workshop. When Niko met me that evening he gallantly presented me with an exquisite flower made out of a ratty old cardboard box. My heart instantly melted.

Thursday
Cité des Sciences take two: workshops booked this time and predictably boys are already yearning to return again. Dinner was an attempt to further the boys culinary education in the shape of frogs legs at Roger La Grenouille, 26 rue des Grands Augustins, 6e, near our apartment in St-Germain des Près (which, incidentally, we rented through agency Paris Attitude).

Friday
Day 7 in Paris ushered in a quick march up the Arc de Triomphe for triumphant views of the capital. Daily dose of culture done, the boys spun and swung and flew on all manner of funfair rides in the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne, a favourite park they’re already citing as their holiday highlight.

Second post to follow on what the kids did with two weeks in Paris …

Paris en famille: Goûter for €36 #gulp

They’d have been just as happy squatting on the pavement edge, licking a Berthillon ice-cream to the merry beat of street buskers on Pont Louis Philippe. And it would have been cheaper.

Instead we plumped for one of Paris’ most historic cake shops and tea rooms to give the boys that sacrosanct mid-afternoon snack no child in France goes without – goûter.

I sipped Earl Grey poured from an antique silver teapot and watched in amusement as the 6-year-old tucked into a lurid, bubblegum-pink Ispahan built from two raspberry macarons delicately glued together with rose-petal cream. Eggshell-crisp on the outside and soft ‘n chewy inside, it is these sweet treats baked in a rainbow of lurid colours that Ladurée in St-Germain des Près is known for.

Needless to say the sugary-sweet cake, fresh raspberries et al, went down a treat until he hit a lychee. Dramatic grimace followed by ‘Mummy, I don’t like the gluey thing’. So uncultured.

Tomorrow we’ll do the kerb on the bridge.

Paris en Famille: Jardin du Luxembourg

There are certain streets, bistros, parks that madly truly deeply make me feel I’m in Paris: Jardin du Luxembourg is one of them.

Saturday was no exception. Hot of the TGV, overload of luggage dumped at the apartment, we hot-footed it to Jardin du Luxembourg: the boys needed an energy burner and I wanted to unabashedly revel in that delicious feeling of ‘being in Paris’.

When @luefkens suggested renting a old-fashioned sailing boat – good-value entertainment at €3.20 an hour – to float on Palais de Luxembourg’s fish pond I was a tad skeptical. What on earth could be so fascinating about watching the wind puff a toy boat across the water for an hour?

Boy was I wrong. The boys loved it, jumped with joy, screamed in delight as they sprinted madly from one side of the monumental pond to the other in hot pursuit of their yo-yoing boats, nudging them away from the edge with a simple bamboo stick and screaming in excited horror as their vessel veered perilously towards the fountain in the pond’s middle. Pure unabated old-fashioned pleasure enjoyed by Parisian families since 1922.

And what did I do? Run around in circles after the pair of them (as did every parent there) trying frantically to keep them in sight!

Paris en famille: How to do it

Every travel writer has their own way of doing it. Mine invariably ends up en famille, a mode of travel that prompts immediate admiration from almost everyone I meet.

Bizarre really: if anyone seriously thinks I can research a guidebook with two overly-boisterous, attention-greedy boys and a baby who needs breastfeeding every four hours they must be mad. No way.

Except that that is precisely how this research trip has pared out. Fortunately I did bring my secret weapon along in the shape of devoted papa @luefkens who entertains the kids – all three of ’em – while I work.

Secret’s out. That’s how I do it.

So here we are in Paris, smugly snug in a 70-sq-meter apartment, a hop and a skip from Le Bon Marché in the well-heeled 6th arrondissement. Sped here by TGV from Geneva to Gare de Lyon where lugging our luggage (more pieces than people – blame the baby) from platform to taxi rank was a feat of engineering in itself.

Hotel Everland, Paris

 

 

Today is one of the last days to bid for a bed in Paris’ most unique hotel:

• No guest is allowed to stay more than one night.
• It sits on the roof of Palais de Toyko, near the Trocadéro in the 16e arrondissement.
• Fly with the birds: Everland is one room, sky high, glass-fronted and curtain-less to explose full frontal of soul-soaring Paris panorama.
• Become art: the pea-green box is a piece of interactive art created in 2002 by Swiss artists L/B aka Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann. Guests are ‘an integral part of their project’.
• Retro romance: flop on lime sofa, spin 1980s vinyl on the turntable and wallow in Eiffel Tower views otherwise exclusive to Parisian pigeons.

Oh to have $1000! The last available nights in Paris are now being auctioned on ebay (Hotel Everland moves end of April 2009): Auction today for nights of 23 & 24 April, 17 March for 25 & 28 April, 22 March for 29 April and 27 March for 30 April.

Paris Tweet

I’ve started tweeting, prompted by The Guardian’s Benji Lanyado who hopped on the Eurostar to Paris with no more than the Twitter community in his hand as guidebook. I say no more. During his two days in the capital the travel writer was swamped with tweets from Paris-savvy microbloggers recommending everything from insider museums and art galleries to cafés, bistros and a Montmartre restaurant from @MsMarmiteLover with a fabulous history and fabulously rude waiters. Being something of an old-fashioned girl with a dozen-plus traditional guidebooks under my belt and a contact book bursting with more Paris addresses than I could ever fit in Lonely Planet’s travel guide to said city, I had to chip in.

 

For the ethical guidebook writer whose holy trinity is something along the lines of walk to the end of every street, leave no stone unturned and converse with everyone until you’re blue in the face, Twitter is a no-brainer. Be it as a pre-trip research and planning tool or immediate line to the world while on the road, it is essential guidebook-research kit.

 

‘Travel gold’ Benji wrote of the top three tips he was sent, one of which I hasten to add without sounding too smug was mine @tripalong. How I found Galerie Pièce Unique, a gem of a contemporary art gallery in St-Germain des Prés that exhibits just one unique work at any given time? By walking up, down and around street after street after street in left-bank Paris for days and days and days…