In which we don't go to the Cité des Sciences

Over the holiday break, it seemed like a good idea to get together with some friends of ours so that our kids would have someone to play with. After some emailing back and forth with Elinor, it was decided that the kids and I would meet her and her kids at the Cité des Sciences around noon on Wednesday. The forecast was for warm (for December) but wet, and we figured that if it rained we could take the kids to the Cité des Enfants, and if it was dry we would go to the (evidently, it had been closed every time we'd tried to go) cool playground in the Parc de la Villette.

The kids and I arrived a little bit early because of train schedules, and watched waves of people pouring into the Cité. By the time Elinor and her kids arrived, the reservations for the Cité des Enfants were completely booked until the 5:15 session, which we decided was too late to bother with. (We wouldn't have gotten home until past 7:30, and I still needed to buy groceries for dinner.) The planetarium had space for the 5:00 showing, which wasn't a whole lot better. So we went downstairs and found a table at which to eat our sandwiches and fruit, then headed outside.

Five minutes later, we had arrived at the playground, which was, of course, closed. The bamboo garden (also supposed to be cool) was also closed, so we wandered around the Parc until Sapphire started complaining that this was the boringest playdate ever, and she thought that the point of a playdate was to play, and . . .. (If you know her, envision pretty standard Sapphire histrionics.) So Elinor pulled her maps of Paris book out of her pocket, and we started looking for something else to do.

We ended up walking the mile or so to Parc Buttes Chamont, which is really a very pretty park, though more so in the spring. We found a sandbox area, complete with sketchy looking guy off in a corner, and the kids played in the sand for a while. (Well, the girls played. Ezio mostly sulked because sandboxes don't involve climbing, or running, or any of the other things he likes doing. Sitting and making Princess Cherry a house out of sand is just not his thing.) Eventually we got up and walked around the lake in the center of the park. Sapphire and Rebecca found a holly tree, and the kids all snagged twigs from it. We went into a grotto (which I suspect was manmade) and watched the (also probably manmade) waterfall cascading down. Eventually we found an exit to the park, and realized that we'd been holding the map upside down. The play area we had found was not at all the one that we thought we had found, and the nearest metro stop was not, as I thought, right at the exit, but several blocks away. Fortunately there was a carousel that was participating in the free carousel program, so the kids all got to ride. (Over Christmas break, there are about 20 carousels in Paris that offer free rides. We had already passed 3 or 4 that weren't.) We headed to the metro station, and hopped our respective trains for home.