With a new member, the team heads back to Paris

We had several goals in visiting Paris this fall: introduce the city to our new travel buddy, hazard a trip to the Louvre with a toddler in tow, and find some parks, pastries, and wine. In all regards, the trip was a delirious success.

Paris is the most favored city -- after Tokyo -- for Christine and me. We both studied here: me during the autumn several years before Christine in the spring. We also passed some time here with my family during another deliriously successful trip in 2014 (also in the autumn). Bobby even visited the city when he was just a little pain au chocolate baking in his mum, and she and I came for the French Open during the famous spring 2016 floods in central Paris (lots of rained-out tennis that week...).

The Louvre is a particular favorite of mine. As a student, I had class in the Louvre most Wednesday nights. It's easy to dismiss it as "touristy," but it is also an unrivaled trove of the world's cultural artifacts kept in one of the grandest buildings any of us could ever visit. It certainly makes Buckingham Palace look pedestrian.

And now I like the Louvre even more because Bobby liked it. We got him interested by getting him excited about the paintings, trying to explain to him what he was seeing, identifying paintings of animals (lots of horse paintings there) and infrastructure (e.g., bridges), and just generally trying to make it fun for him.

Family photo after leaving the Louvre. Notice that Bobby is looking tired. After spending two hours in the galleries and more time in the gift shop, he was anxious to take a nap. By the way, lots of people criticize the pyramid for being too modern, but I actually love it. It is a lightweight and elegant design that doesn't overwhelm its neighborhood. I mean, you can see through it: it isn't intrusive. Underneath is a huge crowd management system that is necessary and useful for this very well visited institution. Some modernity has to creep into a place that is so highly in demand by modern people. This was handled well.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace is quite spectacular. Like many before him, Bobby was quite taken with her. He liked her wings because airplanes have wings; most exciting was that the base looked like a boat. Pointing at planes and boats is still a favored pastime of the little vehicle enthusiast.

Opposite the Mona Lisa is the Wedding at Cana, which is quite spectacular itself. Bobby enjoyed this painting because of the busy action. In this painting, Jesus is turning water into wine, and then the party gets fun. Bobby was avidly pointing out the water and wine and was also excited for the dogs and cats.

In the left corner of the Wedding at Cana is a dog resembling our A'addi. We tried hard to look deep into the paintings to find aspects Bobby would be interested in. Even if you've seen them many times, re-looking at these paintings, with a view toward educating your child, is an exhilarating experience, as is all travel with your child. City parks were never so interesting until we had a child. And so the canon of Western art, we have now learned. 

After lunch, after the Louvre, in the cafe near our apartment rental, a tired Bob contemplating all of the trains he will ride once he wakes up from his nap. Or is this just a future Jean-Paul Sartre, contemplating existence while sat in residence at his favorite cafe? All of the food at this meal was ordered by Papa in French. And thus exhausts the language skills I spent five years developing (several decades ago...). However, in Paris we were working on Bobby's language skills. He was routinely using au revoir and merci (upon prompting by his parents).

We selected this weekend to visit Paris because it is the first weekend after the Beaujolais Nouveau arrives. This is the first wine released for drinking from the year's harvest. It's not necessarily the best wine, but it is fruity and fun to drink with friends. When I was a student in Paris, I was drinking Beaujolais Nouveau all over the city (while failing my classes). In cafe windows around town you will spot the signs advertising its arrival (Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!). In Paris this year I was still chasing that feeling -- though a little different these days: we barely drank a bottle between us and managed to be in bed long before the party animals out in the street in front of our apartment rental!

Other weekend goals included pastry consumption. My wife is a pastry fan, and my son has become one as well. Back in 2016, we literally were taking bagfuls of pain au chocolate into the stadium for pregnant Christine during the French Open. Baking is hard. But Paris is one of the most competitive baking markets in the world, and we, consumers of baked goods, benefit because the bad bakers just can't last; and we consumers can't find bad bread in the city. The breads are so airy, and with the high volume you can always find bread freshly baked. Freshness is important because the pastry loses its crispness the longer it's been out of the oven, the baguette's squishy moistness starts diminishing until it becomes dry like toast the next morning.

Both mornings in Paris, Dad woke up early to procure pastries. Here is the boy in the rental apartment chowing down on an early morning chocolate almond croissant. It is funny how he kept asking for "pay-shtee." Even before this trip we already knew he was a pastry fan. Just like his mum, he also has a fondness for those Portuguese custard tarts, which we have seen him demolish in Portugal and London.

Dessert crèpe in the Marais after dinner with an old friend. As that jar in the background hints, Mum's crèpe is loaded with delicious chocolate hazelnut spread -- but also bananas because we're health-conscious. Bobby was an avid consumer of this particular dessert. The dinner before this was at a restaurant, Pavé, specializing in cuisine from the Aveyron, a French region I was not familiar with. However, the food was prepared with ample garlic, so we shall seek it again.

For Bob, other than the pay-shtees, the highlights were the Métro and Luxembourg Gardens, especially the sailboats. We stayed in the Fifth Arrondissement, which is famous for its student population, but we stayed here not for the student bars but to be nearby the Luxembourg Gardens. Since adding Bob to our team, we are keen seekers of public parks. Luxembourg Gardens has a pond that's famous for the toy sailboats that kids push into the fountain and collect on the other side, or wherever the wind takes them. As you can see in the photo below, good times were had.

Sailboat fan in the Luxembourg Gardens admiring the regatta.

Putting the paper tickets into the gantry was a favorite activity of the boy. He liked that the machine pulls the ticket in and then spits it out. Even better, there is a train on the other side of the gate! The torch light of train love continues to shine bright for the boy.

We love Paris for several reasons. I nominally speak French and spent years studying French film, art, and also law; it is the non-English language city that I know the deepest. The city provides a curated consumer and cultural experience. We love how the French invest so much attention to detail, maintaining provenance, priding cultural antecedents, and striving for quality in the everyday. Paris is like Tokyo but less crowded, with a more uniform and beautiful streetscape, and better museums. There is so much energy in Paris dedicated to maintaining its character but also reinvesting in and regenerating it constantly. It may look old, and the museums are old and full of old stuff, but the city's contents are dynamic and always up to date. It is one of the hippest cities in the world. Christine and I are very glad we are now sharing with Bobby all of the fun times we have in this city.

And another highlight of the boy's trip: the Eurostar! It is super fast, or as Bob would say "shoop fash." Speed is usually measured in relation to how fast Gugu's car is. You'll see in Bob's hand a model of a Mini Cooper not too unlike Gugu's. He's also holding a London city bus. He has a very strong desire to always be holding as many vehicles as possible. You may also notice some ornate archways through the window; this picture was taken while sitting on the platform at St. Pancras (London's international railway station). The day we rode the Eurostar to Paris, I started the day in Zurich with a jog on Lake Zurich, then attended a meeting, flew to London, picked up Bobby, met Mum at St. Pancras, and ended the day in Paris. The Eurostar travels through a tunnel under London and then under the English Channel. I was fascinated by the Chunnel engineering project as a kid; now I travel through it with my son; we have come full circle.