When we visited Paris 3 years ago, we went to the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie once, and spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 40€ on admission to the main science museum and the children's museum for everyone. Then we realized that for an additional 20€ or so, we could have had unlimited access to the entire museum for a full year (or, at any rate, the remaining 6 weeks or so that we were going to be in Paris).
This time, we were smarter, and bought an annual pass to the Cité shortly after our arrival in Paris. We've gone several times since then, and though we've always been able to get into the main museum (which doesn't have a reservation system), we've had spotty success at making it into the various parts of the museum that require reservations. We'd had a great deal of success the first few times we went with reserving spots upon arrival at the Cité, but no success whatsoever since Christmas or so. Although there is an online system for reserving spots ahead of time, it is, naturally, in French, and I had become frustrated with figuring out how to make it work. (In case you were wondering, it's very easy to use if you want to pay for your reservation spot, and much less easy if you want to use your CitéPass to reserve it. It also requires that you reserve at least a day ahead, which doesn't always work very well with my desire for sponteneity.)
Sunday afternoon though, Ezio said that he wanted to go to the Cité des Enfants over spring break, and Sapphire reminded me that she had wanted to go to Bon Appetit (the new food exhibit) and that we'd been unable to get tickets for either of them the last time we had gone to the Cité, so I decided to take another shot at the online system. If I could make it work, we would know that we had spots, and could skip the interminable lines to buy tickets. After 20 minutes of searching, I discovered that I needed to log in, using my member number and email address, and that I would then be able to use system to put reservations on our passes for Tuesday. (The Cité, like many Paris museums, is closed on Mondays.)
Tuesday morning, after a trip to the grocery store, we set out for the Cité des Sciences. We had a reservation at 11:15 for Bon Appetit, which is a temporary exhibit on food geared toward older kids, so after we had cleared security and dropped our backpack off at the coat check room, we headed up the escalators to the exhibition, and waited in line behind a huge "school" (actually a centre de loisirs) group to get in. After we had assured the woman at the entrance that we had all used the bathroom already (no bathroom inside, and se wouldn't be allowed back inside once we left, we headed into the exhibit.
We started by watching a large mechanical digestive system turn pretend food into pretend poop, which it dutifully pretended to deposit in a pretend toilet. We explored which products come from various substances: lipstick from potatoes? Yup. We learned about what kind of food shoppers we were (though the station might have been more informative if the items we had to choose between had prices attached). We also waited in line for a very long time to play a "game." The idea was that you took a small packet of crackers, and then answered questions on a computer as you explored the food with all of your senses before deciding whether or not you liked it. Unfortunately, the game took about 5 minutes per person, and there were only 2 computer stations, so you can imagine the sort of wait that was involved in order to actually participate. Sapphire stuck out the line. The rest of us ended up sitting on the floor and talking about where we were going to go to eat our lunches.
After we had finished up at the food exhibit, we were all quite hungry and ready for lunch, so I picked up the backpack at the coat check, and we headed outside for a picnic in the Parc de la Villette. Then, back inside to redeposit the backpack, wash our very sticky hands, and wait for our slot at the Cité des Enfants to begin. Since the Cité des Enfants is divided into two parts, one for 2 to 7 year olds, and the other for 5 to 12 year olds, and children are not permitted to be unaccompanied, I had had to make a choice as to which side I wanted to make reservations for. As the food exhibit was geared for older kids, and we had ended up at the older kids part of the children's museum the last time we were there, I made reservations for the little kids side of the museum.
Cherry wanted to start out at the water section, so that's what we did, then headed over to go through obstacle courses, write with light pens, and draw with our fingers on touch screen computers. (Surely there is an iPod application that does this?) Then the kids wanted to go to the construction zone, where, amazingly, they stayed for almost 20 minutes. Normally, Cherry only lasts for a few minutes because it tends to be crowded and somewhat crazy. She doesn't much like that. Finally, we explored scents and sounds and mirrors, and tried to figure out what size we were by trying out bikes, coats, chairs, and handprints of varying sizes. Cherry is medium small, Sapphire, just plain medium, and I think even Shaq might find the largest sizes a bit big.
Once they kicked us out of the children's museum, we headed outside to the Garden of winds and dunes, which is one of these playgrounds that seems like it should be far cooler than my children think it actually is. For one thing, it always seems to be incredibly crowded. For another, it is set up in such a way that if you have kids of different ages, it's easy for them to be sent off to different parts of the playground to play (and the age ranges are not overlapping), which means that the kids in the older sections are typically not very well supervised. At many playgrounds, this wouldn't be a problem, but this one is set up so that only a few entrance points control access to great swaths of the older kids' parts of the playground, and those points can easily be monopolized be only a handful of children, thereby blocking access for everyone else. After 40 minutes or so, Sapphire reiterated her earlier claim that it was the dumbest playground ever, and that she never wanted to go back.
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