The rest of Tuesday...can you believe it???

Place St.-Michel...can't say much more than...Wow! Huge fountain, lots of traffic! We stood and marveled at the fountain and its craftmanship for a bit. Its features, specifically the Griffins, were magnificent. We stood there and were impressed - but our attention was severly drawn away when we realized that we were very hungry. We noticed a place called Mich sandwich that was making sandwiches to go so we went to check it out. John got a chicken sandwich and I got a 3 Fromage (cheese) one, mine was put into a panini press. It was soooo yummy. It was like a grilled cheese sandwich. It had mozerella, blue cheese, and goat cheese, and tomatoes and after being pressed the guy put a pesto sauce inside it - it was scrumptous!!

We walked back across the front of the Palais du Justice with our sandwiches and made our way to Place du Chatalet where we visited another fountain, this one with sphinxs. The sphinx fountain was incredible. John and I talked about how much Egyptian influences are in different parts of the city and I explained that its because of Napoleon's travels to Egypt and the art that he "brought" back - so of course there would be a lot. While we were standing at the fountain it got incredibly windy and the water from the spinxs splashed everywhere. Leaves tumbled around and the sound of the wind through the trees, along with the roar of the traffic made such a jumble of energy. Silly me got a little wierded out and looked at John and said, "I don't know - has Paris ever had tornadoes?" Which was funny because I always go to the extreme and John looked at me like I was crazy - at first I thought it was a "You're asking me?" look - but instead he just thought I was my silly self.

There was a creperie close by making to go/take away crepes so we got one and were a little disappointed with it - we've decided we're not crepe people. Across from the creperie was a landmark of Tour St.-Jacques. Its a gothic tower that looks like it should belong to Notre Dame - it is actually thr remains of an ancient church, we took some photos of it then made our way to find the location of the web cam. We twisted and turned our way through the streets until we started up towards the Pomidou Center, then we turned down a little alley-like street looking for the courtyard we wanted.

For months leading up to the trip I had been watching the web cam of an enclosed patio and while peeking in on it I would see a beautiful black labrador dog that I started referring to as the cafe lab. When we got to the patio she was there! She is even cuter in person! We sat at the cafe, called The Studio, and had coffee and tea along with a crumb du pomme, to make up for our dissatisfying crepe and enjoyed the scenery. We had made plans with Edana and Jen back home to capture our photos at the web cam and I realized I'd left my cell phone at the hotel - so we decided to go back for it, which was good because I needed to change my shirt anyway (I'd gotten spills on it earlier from my cheese panini). It rained a little while we were sitting at the cafe and it cooled off the day. We got the phone, changed my shirt, freshened up, lightened our load - and headed back out. We picked up some water and I bought some slippers for my sore feet and headed back to the web cam locale.

When we returned to the patio we met a young woman that was playing with the lab and we chatted with her for a bit. We found out that she is French/American. Her American half is from San Francisco of all places! She was very pleasant to talk to and cued us in on a few secrets of other little gardens by the Louvre. By the time we were ready to get going we noticed more dogs showing up at the patie. They were adorable. There was a husky/malamute and a Pekenese.
We got on our way to the cyber cafe so we could upload our photos, contact people back home, and get our first couple of days blogged (like this one :) ) John had to run back to the hotel (agian) because we had run out of battery power in the camera and we forgot the extra ones, and on the way back he picked up dinner - falafels!

By this portion of the trip our feet were really hurting, worse than I had anticipated - so we're going to have to adjust our sightseeing to include more rest stops! We're so impressed by all we've seen so far and there's still so much to see and enjoy! We're looking forward to whatever our whims guide us to!

-Karen