Day Forty-Two
Paris
18 September 2007 22:51

Today we had originally planned to visit a castle around half an hour out of Paris but were so tired after yesterday at Disneyland we instead just bummed around Paris.

First, we headed to the Disney Store on Champs Elysee as there were a few things we’d see when we first visited that were curiously no at the Disney Park of Village next door.

After, we headed to Montmatre where we grabbed lunch — again two baguettes with meat and salad — and also bought a suitcase for our rapidly crowing souvenir colleciton.

Back at our hotel, we dumped the suitcase and headed out again.  On our way out the hotel staff gave us a small bottle of red wine; we weren’t sure why.

We walked down to the canals which weren’t far away.  I knew there are canals in France but not right in the middle of Paris itself.  We watched a boat go through a couple of the locks before moving on.

Our next destination was Hotel de Ville which seemed to be closed so we just wanted around the 1st and 2nd suburbs; finding a church we hadn’t seen before, we sat in the park watching some people play a few games of Petanque.

We did some shopping — it seems to be what you do in Paris — before ducking into a supermarket to get some food for dinner.

Tomorrow we head back to London for the second last leg of our trip which, sadly, is coming to a close.  We both agree that we could keep going but all good things must end eventually.

I’d been wanting to get one for a while, but hadn’t gotten around to it; so yesterday, we bought one of those dirt-cheap Boules sets you’ve probably seen around the place.

Since it was such a nice day yesterday, Justine and I played a few rounds of petanque outside in our back yard. If you’ve never heard of petanque, imagine lawn bowls except instead of rolling the ball you can also chuck the bell as close to the jack as possible. It can be played in pretty much any surface but is usually sand or gravel.

It’s quite a fun little game and rather relaxing if you don’t try to rush through a game. For some reason I thought it was Italian but it’s actually French (the name sort of gives it away, though I didn’t know that petanque was the game we were playing until a bit later on).

Since the boules are quite heavy (not sure how heavy ours are, but generally they weigh between 650g and 800g each according to the earlier-posted Wikipedia article), I might recommend that if you try to juggle them like I did, you might not want to accidentally have one land on your finger.