In which we drag our children through two museums

One of the wonderful things about France is that on the first Sunday of each month most of the national museums are free. While children are always free at these museums, we adults are not, so we try to get as much as possible out of free days. The museums are typically a bit busier than they might be otherwise (though I'm not sure), but it removes a lot of the pressure to make sure that we get our money's worth from the experience.

This past Sunday was the first Sunday in August, so Blaise and I sat down on Saturday night to figure out where to go. This list of free museums in hand, we immediately eliminated several (including the Louvre, because we're thinking about getting an annual pass, the Orsay, and the Museum of the Middle Ages) because we wanted to pick museums that were less popular with tourists. We figured that while they might not know about free days, they were likely to show up at certain museums in swarms anyway, and we didn't want to be there. We'll go to those museums this fall when they're likely to be less crazy. We also wanted to pick 2 museums that were relatively close together so that we could walk between them and not have to waste Metro tickets.

Sunday morning we set out for the Musee Quai Branly, a relatively new museum specializing in primitive art. We arrived 20 minutes or so before opening and had to wait in a substantial line, but things moved quickly once the museum opened. The first step was to find a bathroom, since I should (evidently) have stopped after a single bowl of coffee that morning. (The French drink their morning cafe au lait out of bowls rather than cups, which seem to perpetually be much too small to bother with.) We dropped the Ergo off at the coat check, then headed up the ramp to the exhibits. A few highlights of the museum were the decorated skulls (from Oceania), the big grassy looking costumes (from Papua New Guinea), and the collection of African instruments. (We had to listen to the guy behind us go on and on about how shocked he was to learn that they had instruments other than drums in Africa. And then listen to his anti-rap diatribe.) They had a temporary Tarzan exhibit upstairs which we also went to. It was supposed to be a kids' exhibit, though I don't think our kids got much out of it. They did think the Viewmaster things they had set up along one wall were pretty cool. Poor kids are growing up in a post Viewmaster world.

Afterwards we were all pretty hungry and not sure what we were going to do about food, restaurants in Paris being largely out of our budget. I noticed people carrying baguettes and eventually found the boulangerie that they were coming from, so I picked up a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches and a very expensive half liter bottle of water. (We had eaten pancakes for breakfast and were having beef stew for dinner, so we didn't need a very substantial lunch.) We ate lunch sitting in a little garden just to the side of the Eiffel Tower and afterward the kids ran around a bit.

After lunch we walked through the Champs du Mars and along the Trocadero to the Musee Guimet, which specializes in Asian art. Most of the pieces that we saw were statues (we didn't make it up to the top floors, since the kids were beginning to wear out). Cherry was quite good at recognizing statues of Buddha by the time we left, and Sapphire and Ezio were having fun counting the arms on the statues of some of the Indian goddesses. Ezio found one that he thinks had 244 arms.

Blaise and I had talked about walking to a more distant metro station on the way out because it was supposed to be an interesting walk, but Sapphire and Ezio were quite insistent that we go down to the metro at the first possible opportunity.