Day 10 - Musée D'Orsay, the Parc du Champs de Mars park

We toughed out the dungeon breakfast and stole some extra food to stow in the orange bag for snacks.  The Musée D’Orsay is on the other side of the river from our hotel, and we haven’t been on that side very much, so we decided to walk.

We passed though an open-air flower market…

… and got a close-up look at the Art Deco metro signs.  Jordan wants to steal one, but unfortunately they are made of solid iron and weigh a ton.  Probably would be tough to slip through airport security.  But just look at them - they are awesome!  Note the WAR OF THE WORLDS style red lamp.  Long live Deco!

Did we mention the nifty dark green vendor boxes that line top of the walls overlooking the river?  The vendors are called “bouquinistes” and they mostly sell old books, magazines, and prints, with some touristy tchotchkes thrown in.  The book collections mostly look fascinating, but it’s all in French, so browsing isn’t much fun.  Jordan can easily imagine his father retiring to run one of these (if it was in English).  We’ve so far resisted the urge to buy anything touristy (except Katie’s “I heart Paris” tank top) but we’ve seen the same cute thing in a few shops – little salt & pepper shakers shaped like little hugging people! 

One of the bouquinistes has them in all different colors.  We pick our favorite two and buy them.  Into the orange bag you go, little huggers!  Soon they are joined by a collection of drink coasters.  Each one has a different vintage photo of the Eiffel Tower under construction.  All the photos are taken from the same vantage point over a 2-year period, so it’s kind of like early time-lapse photography.  It’s the kind of thing we should hang up in our bathroom.

Jordan won’t stop dreaming about hanging out on one of the quays at the tip of the islands in the Seine.  He’s imagining he & Katie in college, sneaking down to the quay tip after classes to drink beer and play guitar.  We’re near one of them, so we head down the long stone stairs to the quay.  We sit under a willow tree and watch the boats go by on the river.  We wonder when these huge stone riverbanks were built, and by whom.  Why aren’t they undermined by the water, and erosion?  Mysteries.

On the way back up the steps, something unknown catches Jordan’s interest and he starts gawking.  You know what happens when he gawks – TRIP!  OUCH.  The fall gives Jordan a nasty scrape on the arm.  A last souvenir of our trip?  It had to happen eventually.

Somehow, even with this terrible, life-threatening injury, our intrepid newlyweds made it the few blocks to the Musée D’Orsay.  The Musée is a relatively new museum which opened in the 1980s.  The building used to be a train station.  They have an amazing collection, with a big focus on the impressionists.  Our targets were those very same impressionists, as well as the Art Deco and Art Nouveau displays.  Today should be a very Jesus-free day at the art museum.

Inside the main hall:

There's walkways on the top:

We don’t have a photo of Jordan washing his horrible injury out in the museum’s sink.  Sorry, fans.

The Art Deco & Art Nouveau collections are not disappointments!  This stuff is incredible.  Too bad the world moved beyond these aesthetics.  Imagine how great all of our stuff would look today if we were still into Deco and Nouveau.

Here's an entire WALL that craftsmen built in this style:

Detail of the symbol that was insent onto the back of a chair.  Maybe it should be my new HALO 3 icon:

For lunch, we bypassed the formal dining room and got baguette sandwiches (what choice did we have?) to eat outside on the rooftop balcony.  A beautiful view of the city and clean air.  In this photo, Katie is inspired by the mozzarella on her baguette:

View from the top:

Actually, the best part of the rooftop balcony was the people watching.  Best of all was the early-thirties gay tourist couple.  One of them had brought his middle-aged mom on the trip (!!) and she was messing up the whole vacation by asking stupid American questions and insisting the boyfriend take dozens of pictures of her with her son.  The guys were trying to keep it together, but they were getting pretty close to the end of their ropes.  I imagine it all got ugly a few hours later in the gift shop.  They were pretty funny.

Downstairs we finally enter the Impressionists galleries.  It’s magnificent.  Now we can see an evolution in art, after the stagnancy of both subject and form in the Louvre.  The artists are placing their cameras (forgive the expression) in new places, creating a new way of looking at their subjects.  Best of all, they have turned their attention to the everyday person and their own immediate surroundings.  There are pictures of working class dances, of floor sanders working, of haystacks, and of course, the famous lily ponds.  To our great delight, there are some Van Goghs!  It’s true what they say – photos do not do his work justice.  The colors are so bright, the paint is so urgently applied – this is a guy with something to say.  We take his images for granted because we have grown up in a world where these images have always existed, just like the Beatles have always existed, and WWII was always in the past, but there was a time where people didn’t paint bright yellow skies, or do self-portraits with blue lines on their face.  This guy was so far ahead of his time, and so far out of the box.  Was that what drove him mad, or was it a symptom of his madness?

There are a thousand books in the gift store that we want, but we know that our bags are already on the brink of being overweight (by the airline’s standards), so we reluctantly leave with a few postcards and lots of photos for memories.  Sitting outside under a giant statue of a rhino, we decide to head to a part of the city near the Eiffel Tower to check out a famous open-air market.

The Queen of Public Transportation works her magic with the bus routes and soon we’re wandering around a new neighborhood.  There’s a huge park nearby (the Parc du Champs de Mars) so we head over.  There’s a small stadium along the way.  An event inside is blasting techno music.  We go inside and find an international womens’ sand volleyball competition!  For a few minutes, we watch Norway battling China.  I expected big blonde Amazon women from Norway, but the big tall Chinese women were a bit surprising.  Yao Ming, look out!

In the park, the volleyball mania continued.  There were lessons for kids, and non-professional games for men.  We passed the American women’s team sitting at a little table talking to their coach.   We said “Go USA!” to them, but they didn’t seem to appreciate the support.  Maybe they thought we were being sarcastic?

Parc du Champs de Mars

Lounging on the grass in a massive French park is not much different from hanging on the grass in Central Park, except that you’d have to buy baguettes instead of pretzels or hot dogs.

We took one last picture with the Eiffel Tower in the background.

Since we are going home tomorrow, it will be our last time with the tower.  Bye Tower!  You were a good friend!  Now everything is the last.  Our last bus ride.  Our last time looking at the river.  Our last baguette sandwich (actually, that one doesn’t make us so sad).

Back at the hotel, we decided to wander a different part of the Marais in search of dinner.  We knew we were in a gay neighborhood, but tonight we hit the heart of it – Boystown, Paris.  All this time it was just a couple blocks away and we’d never realized it!  Now it’s our last night and we’ve finally stumbled on what everyone else knows our neighborhood for.  Oh well.

Eventually we found a nice place for dinner and tried not to think about this being our last night.  Tomorrow is the our long journey home.  In the morning, we’ll catch a van from our hotel to the airport, then we’ll fly to Iceland again.  After a brief layover there, we fly to Boston.  We’ll arrive around 7 PM and take a shuttle bus to our hotel.  Our flight from Boston to LA leaves at 6:30 the next morning.  That’s not going to be fun.

Since it’s our last night, back at the hotel we asked our funky night desk clerk if there were any big nightclubs to go dancing to the techno that Jordan likes.

Jordan imagines that every night in Paris there is a huge indoor rave going on like in all the movies (or at least, like in BLADE) and he wants to experience it for himself.  Our guy valiantly researches on the internet and even calls a friend, but the only thing going on is gay night, and we’re not feeling that, so no dice tonight.  Instead, we’ll pack for tomorrow’s flight.

The trash can soon fills up with the much-loved but now-useless paperwork of our vacation:  museum brochures, subway maps, train tickets, attraction coupons, scribbled notes of advice from the waitress at Breakfast In America.  We don’t have the heart to throw away the bag of nuts, though.  We might eat them on the plane.  Our REI bags are finally stuffed and ready.  Maybe this time we’re under Iceland Air’s 50 pound per bag limit.  But probably not.  That’s a battle for tomorrow.

Day 9 - wandering, reading, walking the river

Amazingly, we have seen almost all of the tourist sites on our list.  So, today is a day to be Parisians.  We will wander the streets in striped shirts and berets, talking about philosophy and baguettes.  It’s going to be great.  But first, let’s check e-mail.  Our new room is actually in range of the hotel’s wireless connection, so that makes things a lot easier than they were upstairs in the closet room.  What’s this?  An email from our wedding photographer!  She’s posted an album of our best photos.  We huddle together on the bed around the laptop and click the link.

The photos are wonderful and we’re transported back a whole 10 days to our magical wedding.  Beth has captured everything so well and all the important moments are there.  The music accompanying the album is frankly making us teary.  Yay Beth the wedding photographer!

Finally we set off.  Alas, no striped shirts and berets.  Instead, we’re in our usual travel clothes:  shorts, hats, sunglasses, jackets packed in our ever-present orange shoulder bag.  The orange bag with is filled with our travel necessities:  water bottle, Paris maps, Paris tourist book, Pinky the camera, change purse of worthless Euro coins, a baggie of nuts that we never seem to eat, and fruit for snacks.

Our neighborhood is “the Marais”, once the heart of Jewish Paris (before the Paris cops rounded them all up for the Nazis – look it up if you don’t believe me) but now a funky & very gay neighborhood.  It’s full of art galleries, restaurants, and gay guys.  We headed northeast, towards a part of the ‘hood we haven’t seen before.  We want to see the Place de Voges in the daylight, and then head over to the Bastille monument.

KG in the Place de Voges

It wasn’t long after the leaving the Place before we ran into a huge labor rally on the main avenue.  There were thousands of people carrying signs & banners, mixed in with loudspeaker trucks and food carts.  Most of the marchers had stickers stuck on their clothes.  It seemed like a street festival on wheels.  We finally found someone who knew enough English to explain to us what was going on.  They were Federal employees, marching to protest new pension rules.  What kind of country is this, where you get to miss a day of your 35-hour work week to protest not getting a good enough pension when you retire?  Amazing.

The Bastille monument was in the middle of a rotary that was in the middle of the march, so we gave it a quick glance and kept moving.  We marched to the nearby canal to look for a place on the water to spend some idle time reading and writing postcards.  Because Paris is great, we didn’t have to look too far!  Katie sipped champagne as she read THE FALLS. Jordan tried a local beer as he dove into Barak Obama’s book that we bought in Antibes.

KG be chillin at la table

After a while we felt guilty sitting at the table for so long, so we headed off again.  

Jordan’s dream is to walk on the stone quays on the banks of the Seine, so we walked up the canal to where it meets the big river.  Along the way we saw this wonderful graffiti:

We walked up the north bank of the river, in the general direction of our hotel.  Sunbathers were laying out on the quay.  To our horror, several of the Frenchmen thought they’d look smashing in little Speedo banana hammocks.  We counted 7 in a matter of minutes.  Marble bag heaven – if you’re into that sort of thing.  Katie thought that meant it was a gay pick-up quay.  Jordan opined that it was merely Frenchmen being Frenchmen.

Walking along the river is really nice, but if you walk on the wrong part, it gets really hard to get back to the world around you!  The Seine isn’t at the same height as the city around it.  It’s 30 feet below street level.  So there’s the water, then a quay, then a highway, then a huge wall with stair ramps leading back up to the street.  Somehow we managed to get ourselves stuck on a quay that ended with no safe way back to the street.  Traffic was rushing by really fast (I couldn’t possibly guess how fast, because they were all driving in kilometers per hour!) and walking back would take forever.  Katie’s not big on crossing streets without a crosswalk, so it was looking like we might be stuck on that quay forever.  Once we ate the bag of nuts, it would only be a matter of time before we died!  Maybe when our bodies were found, they’d look at the pictures on Pinky and learn who we were… but we still had places to go & things to see, so eventually we got our courage up and made a dash across the highway to safety.  PHEW!

Now that Jordan’s dream had been accomplished, it was time for Katie’s.  We had decided against a dinnertime cruise on the Seine because they were incredibly expensive (and the food looked pretty snobby) so Katie wanted to cruise up the river during the day.  Lucky for us, the city of Paris operates a boat line that has stop up & down the Seine!  It’s the “batobus” – a clever combination of the French word for “boat” and the English word for “bus”.  We got tickets at the stop near Notre Dame.

our Batobus ticket

The boat wasn’t due for another 30 minutes.  So we went up to the street and looked for a place to buy chocolate-covered strawberries. A sullen bartender gave us directions to a chocolatier’s shop across the river.

Isn’t Paris the city of romance?  Then why don’t any Parisian stores sell chocolate-covered strawbs?  It was like not being able to find chocolate mousse in J-le-P.  It just does not make any sense.  It’s an anti-romance, anti-chocolate conspiracy!  The best the chocolatier could do was chocolates shaped like strawberries.  NOT GOOD ENOUGH, FRENCHIE!  Instead we got a box of chocolates (insert your Forrest Gump impression here) and ran back to the boat.

Side note:  a bunch of high school kids from England got on at the same stop.  They were probably the equivalent of 9^th graders.  Also boarding was a tourist family from Holland and the daughter was dressed like a total whore.  I don’t why.  I’m not drawing any conclusions because generally, the Dutch are nice people.

Here we are on the BatoBus water tour.  Eating chocolates like champs.  Everyone else was jealous.

Two hours later, we’ve cruised up and down the river and we’re damn hungry.  We spotted a Mexican place near our hotel a few days ago, and Jordan’s still upset about last night’s cocktail cafe not having chips & salsa, so where to go for dinner just became a no-brainer.  Katie likes to take pictures of food.  She says, “Trips are always about the next meal, so why not have a picture of what you got?”

We were still remembering our magical first night in the city, the one where we didn’t have a camera, so we decided to try to recapture that evening.  We got dressed up at the hotel and set out a-walkin’.  We tried to time it to the sunset. Here we are on one of the bridges:

I’d like to say that this night was as magical as the first, but we were actually pretty tired from walking around in the sun all day and being traumatized by the French highway, so we went home soon after.  We passed scenes like the picture below several times on the way to the hotel – people crowded outside of bars trying to glimpse the soccer game on TV.

Try as we might, we couldn’t muster up the energy to care about soccer, so we went home.  Sorry Europe.  I think the Celtics are busy winning the NBA championships at home… I guess things would be different if that was on the TV.

Speaking of home… we are starting to feel things draw to an end.  We’re heading home in 2 days.  We miss the kitty, we miss our bed, we miss our home and our things and having a cell phone.  Soon this magic three weeks will be done and we will have to return to our normal lives.  A break like this helps you remember what life is for.

Back at the hotel, we flipped channels and got… soccer.  Soccer.  And, soccer.  And the French version of THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN, which was neat because there was Ron Pearlman, and when we get home, Jordan will start editing his dailies on SONS OF ANARCHY.  So, it’s an early look at what will surely become a familiar face.  But, it’s in French, and not a great movie, so we’ve still got nothing to watch.  Then a classic Jordan brainstorm – we can buy a movie on iTunes, and watch it on the laptop!  We decided on THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL and started downloading.  D’oh!  Our connection is so bad that won’t be done downloading until 11:00 tomorrow morning!  Maybe we’ll watch it on the plane home.  Tomorrow’s another day.  Our goal is the Musée D’Orsay, recommended to us by everyone who heard we were going to Paris.  Now if only the idiots outside honking car horns to celebrate tonight’s soccer victories would just shut up!  At least they’re yelling a different language than the idiots who yelled last night.  So we got that going for us.  Which is nice.

Day 8 - The Louvre, and RACE TO THE TOWER!

Ahhh, a real night of sleep in our adult-sized hotel room! We don’t know if it was the triumph over our living conditions, or the fact that it never got dark in Paris until 10 at night, but we began to sleep in every morning until around 10am. Not the norm for us, especially not Katie. She’s usually a very up-and-at-‘em kinda gal. But, hey, it’s our honeymoon! Most mornings, we head downstairs for our hotel’s sad complimentary continental breakfast. Way downstairs – 2 floors below street level into a stone basement with low arched ceiling. It’s frighteningly similar to a prison cell. You can imagine being chained up down here at the king’s whim, with no hope of ever seeing the sunlight again. But there is some effort at décor down here amongst the condemned – a coat of yellow paint, which is universal color code for “cheery!” (Nicole and Erin, can you say “hostile hostel?”)



But today, we’ve had enough of baguettes and hard boiled eggs. Where does one go to get a real breakfast in Paris? That’s right, faithful readers, you guessed it, all together now - Breakfast in America to the rescue! Yummo!

drunk with pleasure at the thought of yummy American breakfast!

Since this was Katie’s second trip to Paris, she had already experienced a bit of the Louvre (not that one trip can do it justice). So we decided to part ways for a few hours. Jordan would go to the Louvre and Katie would sit to read and write at a little café or park nearby. That is Katie’s idea of a perfect French day.



We synchronized our cheapo watches and decided to check in at one of two meeting places in an hour, and each hour after that, in case one of us wasn’t done with our solo adventure yet. Katie sent Jordan off to the Louvre with a kiss and a hug and wandered off to one of the little fountain ponds on the nearby grounds of the Palais. She hunkered down in a metal slatted bouncy chair and dug into her latest Joyce Carol Oates novel, THE FALLS. It was overcast and spitting rain every now and then, but Katie was good and warm in the North Face microfleece she bought for the trip along with the Carrie-Bradshaw-On-A-Budget black rain jacket Nicole picked out for her back home. It was quite stylish, while also keeping the new bride dry.



Meanwhile, in the Louvre… Jordan knew himself well enough to predict an afternoon in an art museum would go like this: get in and start looking at every single thing on exhibit. At first everything is carefully scrutinized and appreciated, but then panic sets in as he realizes he can’t possibly see everything in the amount of time he has. So he begins to move faster, faster, and soon he’s hurrying through every collection just to be able to finish the task before closing time. It’s not a pretty sight and was something to be avoided, so this time Jordan decided on a new strategy. He figured out the highlights he wanted to hit and resolved to be out in a few hours. That means, the Mona Lisa, any sculpture by Michaelangelo, and maybe 1 or 2 other things. He went into the glass pyramid, descended by escalator the below-ground lobby, and started moving. (by the way, the glass pyramid doesn’t go upside-down like in the DAVINCI CODE. That’s a lie!)

Louvre admission ticket

The Louvre is absolutely huge, covering a few square blocks, all old stone buildings filled with artwork and tourists. It’s quite amazing. Unfortunately, the themes quickly began to grate on our atheist tourist… pictures of Jesus… pictures of Mary… pictures of Jesus and Mary… pictures of saints thinking about Jesus or Mary… centuries of the western world’s best artists, seemingly unable to depict any other subject. Imagine what work they could have produced if the church hadn’t had such a stranglehold on their societies… all that time and talent wasted. What a shame.



Upstairs, after a nice amount of time in the park, Katie decided to head back to the café in the Louvre courtyard and wait for Jordan. She ordered the most expensive cup of tea ever and enjoyed every bit of it with the Boursin cheese and baguette she bought that morning to prepare for a day in the city. (The bakery was truly a feast for the eyes, and we had to leave before Jordan started drooling on the pastries.)

Katie was planning to use the bread, cheese, and some tomatoes to reenact the lunch she and Nicole ate every day on the beach during her first trip to France over 15 years ago. Alas, she forgot her knife, so couldn’t cut the tomatoes. Unused, they ended up getting squished in her bag, oh well.



Downstairs, Jordan was standing in front of the MONA LISA and feeling… unimpressed. Enigmatic smile? Not by my lights. Perhaps a very early example of hype and spin… I truly don’t get what people think is so great about this painting. It’s possible that overexposure to the image has numbed me to it, but really, what’s the big deal? And here’s another question – why are all the guys in the statues naked? They’re doing tough, manly-man kinda stuff, like slaying dragons or killing their foes with mighty swords – all with their units hanging out. Isn’t that the first thing you’d cover if you were going to duke it out with a dragon? I’d cover it with asbestos, but these guys are letting it all hang out. Puzzling.



Katie waited ‘til a few minutes past the first meeting time and decided to explore the city before the next rendezvous time. She wandered just a few blocks away and happened upon a happy sight – the National Theatre! She could only get in to the lobby, alas the theatre was closed, but just being near it and soaking in the tribute statues to the likes of Moliere was good enough for her. She tried to find a play for her and Jordan to attend in Paris that would be in English, like Shakespeare or an original version of a classic, but there were none to be had. Outside was a beautiful square with pillars and checkered stone walkways, full of kids playing on large stone stumps. It seemed like a school trip of kids were there and they all sat on their stumps screeching and playing some kind of game.



Inside, Jordan was in the late 1600s / early 1700s and some images had emerged that actually had some human interest. Here’s the one he liked the best:

2 artists facing the camera (oops, I mean, the canvas) and one gestures proudly to his sculpture in the background. I like that. Two guys in the same field, comfortable with each other, taking a little pride break. That’s real life, something I can identify with, a lot more than pictures of a fat little baby being fawned over by everyone around him.



It was time to meet up again so Katie hightailed it through the spittle back to meet Jordan. She didn’t see him at first so she sat on the stone bench that had the slightest bit of cover to keep dry and started back into her book. Turns out Jordan was doing the same thing, a few alcoves over. Finally Jordan spotted Katie, and they had a nice reunion after their longest separation since they’d been married. AWWW!

Katie showed Jordan the National Theater. Hunger quickly set in, and we walked back to our neighborhood to find the next outdoor café to dine at. We settled on a cocktails place on the corner. Lots of people were sitting outside at little tables that ran the length of the sidewalk in front of the place, and they all looked like they were having lots of fun. Surely a place like that is going to have chips and salsa for our poor hungry tourists… right? Right? WRONG! And even more baffling, the back legs of the chairs were fastened to the table legs with immovable plastic ties, so we couldn’t get the leg room we wanted. Nonetheless we toughed it out, and were rewarded with some good food & intoxicating drinks.

Feeling tired, we headed back to the hotel room. Once again, there’s championship soccer on the television. There’s some Cup going on. European Cup? Maybe. We only get 3 channels, and soccer is the one with the best reception. We work on postcards and planning the itinerary for the rest of our trip. It’s mellow. But Jordan is still hungry, so he goes downstairs to a “trateur” – a restaurant specializing in take-out food – for a nice collection of curry Chinese food. Outside, it’s beautiful. The city is alive, full of promise and people. Jordan is invigorated, he catches a 2nd wind, and runs back upstairs. Katie is surprised by the burst of energy. Jordan proposes… THE RACE TO THE TOWER!



The Eiffel Tower is open for a few more hours, and the view at night will be amazing. Let’s race over there and get up to the top before it closes. Let’s go – right now! Katie catches the impulsive energy and moments later, we’re running through the streets to find the subway station. Katie’s got the route figured out because she’s the Queen of Public Transportation, remember? We run into the station, down the hugest escalator on earth, and find that – our train isn’t running. An announcement on the PA says the line isn’t running because of “a social problem”. Social problem? Like what – too many pregnant teenage girls? We have to find an alternate route – and quick. Again, the Queen rises to the occasion after the initial frustration – the Tower waits for no newlyweds! Soon we are running to another line in the same station. We take that train a few stops, then switch to another train. We’re sweating like crazy in the hot tunnels, consulting the sexy blue watch every few minutes.

We’re getting dangerously close to the cut-off to get into the last elevator to the top of the tower. WE MUST HURRY!



Our train arrives and we burst out into the station. We run at a mad tear for the exit. Emerging on the street, we scan the sky to get our bearings. There it is, barely visible behind by that block of buildings and the thick trees – the massive iron Tower. Which way should we go? We run down the street, panting, running as hard as we can, we turn the corner, and POW! There it is. Huge, bright yellow, covered with light, more enormous than you can imagine, the Eiffel Tower in all its glory. It’s incredible. It’s like turning the corner and there’s Godzilla looming over you. It was the greatest reveal we’d ever experienced!

We ran across a park and got in the line. We were among the last people to get inside. 

Eiffel Tower ticket

Remember that lady that pointed out the twinkling lights of the tower our very first night? Well, no, she wasn’t there. But, the lights were twinkling away our entire trip up in the elevator – sparkly, definitely sparkly! Up we go in a gondola car that runs up the massive leg of the tower. Below us we can see the massive cables that keep us from crashing to our deaths, and the even more enormous wheels that are cranking us ever higher.

please don't fail!

It seems like an endless ride. Finally we are there. Out to the roof we go. The city of lights stretches out below us. Our quest (THE RACE FOR THE TOWER!) is achieved, and we are the heroes!

Eventually the security people started shooing everyone back to the elevators so the Tower could be shut for the night. It’s midnight. Too bad the champagne bar was closed – midnight is the perfect time for champagne. Downstairs, we found a wonderful scene. Beautiful classical music wafting towards us from a large circle of people. We go closer, curious. We move through the crowd and see the source of the music - a circle of high school girls, all playing string instruments!

They are American girls, in Paris to play concerts on an exchange program. Jazzed from their formal performance, they came here for an impromptu street concert. It’s a magical scene under the Tower. After a few short minutes, the police reluctantly send the girls away. Turns out you can’t play at the Eiffel Tower without a permit.



Not yet ready for bed, we bought Nutella crepes and hot chocolate from a riverside stand, and ate them down on the quay, the water murmuring past us.

A great ending to a wonderful night. And, despite all the caffeine from the chocolate, we still slept 'til late morning the next day.