After the Eiffel Tower we hung out at the nearby Parc du Champ de Mars while the kids played in the playground near the southern corner. A lady from New York who was there with her small kids approached us. She hadn’t spoken English to an adult in a week or more it seemed and decided to take it out on us. After 15 minutes or so of non-stop chatter on her part we were wondering if we’d ever get away. Luckily, another lady from the states showed up with her children who were much closer in age to the New York lady’s kids. The New York lady immediately ditched us to burn this other lady’s ears off and arrange play dates with their kids much to our relief.

We walked over to Rick Steves’ favorite Rue Cler to check it out. The place was dead and nothing special on a Monday. We ate lunch at Cafe du Marche which was OK.

Also based on Rick Steves’ recommendation (and those of someone else as well), we decided to head back to Luxembourg Park to check out the puppet show.

We saw a couple of puppet shows in Denmark that were really good and didn’t require any knowledge of Danish to thoroughly enjoy. Admission to see the Danish shows was free. As it turned out, the puppet show (guignols or Marionnettes du Luxembourg) in Jardin du Luxembourg was a huge disappointment. Not only did it cost almost US$10 for each of us to get in, but the puppet show is not the least bit enjoyable unless you are fluent in French. I take that back, even the French adults there didn’t seem to be having a good time. In fact, many people, in addition to ourselves, left at the intermission.

Anyway, back to our walk there from the Rue Cler…

We walked past the above Army Museum (Musee de l’Armee). In the background you can see the dome over Napoleon’s Tomb (Eglise du Dome).

We also walked past the outside of the Rodin Museum (Musee Rodin). Without even going in you can see The Thinker from the backside (pictured above). We saw a much smaller version back in Copenhagen.

The walk was pretty tiring after walking up the Eiffel Tower earlier in the day, but there were some cool sights along the way. For instance, we saw a window washer without any scaffolding; he was just on a rope.

I like the above photograph not only for the window washer but for the French architecture and clouds.

Related posts:

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2. Marais Walk We flew into Orly Airport (ORY) instead of the Paris usual of Charles de Gaulle (CDG). We thought about taking the Orlybus into Paris, but with our luggage, and since there were...
3. Champs-Elysees Walk After the Arch we followed much of Rick Steves‘ “Champs-Elysees Walk” including the Petit Palais, Place de la Concorde, and all the snobby-looking shopping. Actually, we didn’t shop, but...
4. Eiffel Tower (part 1 of 2) Sunday night there was much rain while we slept and the forecast was for more on Monday morning. However, when we looked out the window it looked pretty good so...
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Posted on August 21st, 2008 under Paris • Tags: clouds, museums, Paris, pictures. • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback