Day 147: First Full Day in Paris — Wandering Around with Friends
We woke up in our three little (French) bears’ apartment this morning after sleeping HARD.
After a jog, Teddy picked up some obviously amazing croissants from the bakery downstairs and we ate breakfast together before doing some school.
I slipped out around 11:30 am to go to yet another SoulCycle knockoff class, this time a French brand called Dynamo.
The degree of shamelessness with which all these knockoffs knock SoulCycle off is remarkable. Rules are copy and pasted, branding is always yellow, the format of the class is exactly the same, etc.
Interestingly, though, not one of them that I’ve tried has really nailed it — which just shows that authenticity matters?
But anyway, important for later in the day, I chatted with a woman on the bike next to me who was visiting from New York. Remember that.
I Uber’d to meet up with Teddy and the kids at the little kiddie ride/carousel on the sidewalk in the Marais near the Saint Paul metro stop. They’d walked over while I was exercising.
This ride is a thing Willa discovered when she and I came with my parents in February 2018, and she’s talked about it ever since. So she wanted to take James. They rode the rides 6 times!
We walked around the Marais then met up with the others in the St. Germain neighborhood, where they were just grabbing lunch. We strolled some more, stopped in a playground, stopped at a fruit stand…stopped at another…
Teddy peeled off to go get his haircut, and the rest of us wandered westward.
I plotted a meandering, slower-but-way-more-charming path — our eventual goal was Deyrolle, the old taxidermy store on Rue du Bac in the 7th, but we hit all the little picturesque, less crowded streets in the 6th on our way.
At one point we went into a shoe store and James flopped on a bench, whining: “I HATE these kinds of stores!!” Hahaha.
Still tired from Spain, he was running out of steam and I kind of wished we’d had the stroller at that moment because I wound up carrying him many blocks. T-shirt was soaked with sweat in the front.
We made a pit stop at Monoprix, which had been on my hit list because you can usually find super cute little French kids clothes at Target-like prices. Unfort the stuff was a little more of the contemporary, cheesy variety this time around so left with a light purchase load.
Teddy met back up with us at Deyrolle, which is a must with kids, in my opinion. In a city that doesn’t have *tons* of kid-friendly easy activities, Deyrolle checks a lot of boxes.
It’s an old two-story shop that sells taxidermied zoo and circus animals. A male lion can be yours for just 40k Euros! They have every animal — from red pandas (Willa’s fave) to baby warthogs to polar bears to platypuses. It’s creepy and fun.
(Unfortunately they don’t allow photos inside).
Deyrolle was especially fun for Willa and James (and Teddy and me, too, I guess) because we’ve actually SEEN a lot of these animals this year and the store gave us a chance to get nose to nose with them in a way we couldn’t while in the wild. Lemurs, baboons, African birds, crocodiles, lions, leopards, zebra, giraffes, rhinos, even a marabou stork….
We had a quick kid dinner and grown up cocktail nearby.
From there the kids and Teddy headed home while the moms freshened up for a restaurant night!
Monica, Nathalie and I met up first at Opium, La Cabane, the oyster place my dad loves in the 6th. We had a hilarious experience. When the charming waiter learned that we were not in fact planning to eat a dozen oysters per person — which the small print requires, oops — he let us get away with ordering just 18. But demoted us to a worse table!! It was SO FRENCH.
We didn’t mind – the oysters were incredible. I learned an even more professional way to eat them which involves a knife and scraping the tendon part.
Also – craaaaaazy – but at the table next to us….was the American chick who’d been on the bike next to me at the Dynamo class that morning! I mean what are the odds??
And the funniest part is that she barely remembered anything about our conversation, whereas I remembered everything. (I was like, Am I that forgettable??)
Dinner was at Ellsworth near the Opera. Delicious and fun to catch up on everything happening back home.
Asleep by midnight.
