We got to deal with an aspect of French culture, that we'd rather not have - une grevé (a strike).  I'd heard about the French knack for striking at the drop of a hat for reasons that seemed almost silly by American standards.  We'll there seems to be a law now going into affect, shortening the work week to 35 hours.  Well, the Metro system employees decided that it wasn't fair that they'd be losing that income and decided to shut down the Metro, most of the RER, and all of the buses.  In a word, our plans for the day were trashed!  Fortunately we were in Paris, a place, as many of you know, that is easy to walk around in and see things, so we opted to make this a walking day.

First stop was Les Égouts, or the Paris Sewers.  When prepping for the trip, this just struck me as one of those places that had to be experienced to truly do Paris.  My wife, being the good sport (and a little curious, herself) agreed to check it out.  It's a self-guided tour that actually takes you down into the sewer system as they near the Seine.  The tour gives a fairly comprehensive lesson on the history of the sewers in Paris (some of which was actually pretty neat) as well as an engineering history of how the sewers evolved, complete with some of the 10' high wooden balls they used to flush the system clean (loved how they diplomatically described what they were actually doing!). 

One of the interesting tidbits we learned was how Victor Hugo had a friend of his chart much of the sewers so to use in Les Miserables with incredible accuracy.  Was the tour worth it?  Well, the thirty minute self-guided tour was extremely interesting and worth the three or four dollars admission and now I can truly say I've gone down into the Paris sewers.  Will I go back there?  Nah - not unless I'm with someone else who hasn't been there before and is curious.

From there, we walked across the Seine and up into 8th Arrondisment towards the Champs Elysees.  We started off with some potential of doing some shopping, until we saw the prices.  After that, we were content with looking in the windows.  Most of the shops were of the type I wouldn't go to even if I won a huge lottery.  One neat shop was this chocolate shop complete with a fountain of liquid chocolate in the window.  We did a little more actual shopping on our stroll up the Champs Elysees, stopping in the Virgin Superstore, the Disney Store (of course) and, a few other shops before grabbing some lunch in the French version of a sandwich shop franchise, which was surprisingly delicious and inexpensive (sadly I don't remember the name of it, but it's on the right side of the street as you are walking towards the Arch, about a block away).  From there, it was up to the Arch.

Once again, my trooper of a wife pulled it off!  Bear in mind, at the time of this "adventure," she was about five months pregnant and not horribly thrilled about heights.  But twenty minutes later, we were up at the top of L'Arc de Triomphe.  WOW!  What a view!  The first thing that grabs your eye is just the sheer view of the city.  Then, you are wowed by the star of boulevards leading off into all directions.  Quite interesting to see how the city was rebuilt in the late 1800's to minimize the chances of street rebellions (wider, straight boulevards are much harder to erect barricades in and defend as opposed to the narrow, winding streets in the Latin Quarter - think about the last scenes of Les Miserables).  The only downside was that it was pretty overcast and you could barely make out the Louvre or Sacre Couer.  One other thing that I found curious was that when you get to the top, the Arch seems much smaller in area than it covers.

From there, we started walking back towards the 7^th arrondisment with the hopes of doing some shopping at Le Bon Marche (Metro - Sevres-Babylone).  As we were walking along, my wife noticed people coming out of the Metro entrances --the Metro was working again!  We made it over to Le Bon Marche well before closing and discovered the joys of French clearance sales as they tried to get rid of their Winter stock.  This was a great find as we had a blast finding clothes for our little bundle o' joy (40-60% off sales!).  Having quenched that need, we headed down to the market.  Although their food market doesn't quite have the same air as Harrods does, we didn't let that slow us down.  If we "tried," we could have REALLY done some damage in that place.  As it was, we walked out with about six bags of food - some for our picnic the next day, some to bring home with us.  DEFINITELY a place to check out for some shopping Parisian-style! 

We decided to walk back to the hotel, and stop off at the first restaurant that snagged our attention.  We found a neat neighborhood restaurant across the street from Les Invalides.  At first, I thought I was going to have to smack our waiter as I started getting tired of his "I'm doing you a favor by waiting on you" attitude.  But my wife and I persisted at being cordial and by the end of the evening, he was much more polite and friendly (it's interesting how our dinner seemed to improve as he got nicer!).  From there we made the two block stroll back to hotel. 

Tomorrow: Versailles