Toot Buses and Weigh Scales

We have arrived safely in Paris and, bonus,  our luggage made it too. Happy with the location of our old hotel and charmed by the gracious staff, we are quite pleased with where we are staying. We took advantage of some unexpected brilliant sunshine and spent about three hours walking around the Champs Élysées and along the Seine. We are not too far from the bustle of l’Arc de Triomphe and we walked over several historic bridges to get a little closer to the Eiffel Tower. The sculptural details and the gold statutes on  the bridges closer to le palais are remarkable. The stroll helped us orient ourselves to this very busy city. 

Why did we name the blog “Everything, Everywhere, Something, Somewhere”? Well, this is by far the  busiest city we’ve ever been to and there is something to see or look at, everywhere. The choices of what to do, where to look, are at times overwhelming in a very good way.

We always like to record the little everyday life differences when we travel. This was our first on this trip. There’s a nice grocery store just around the block. When we bought a few bananas the clerk looked at us a little perplexed about why we hadn’t used the weigh scale station near the check-out. A very kind customer, a middle-aged gentleman behind us, proceeded to put our bananas on a scale where you weigh your fruit and a little sticker pops out that you stick onto the fruit, and then and only then, can the clerk process your order. People are so kind and helpful. We’ve already gotten locked out of our luggage with a jammed travel lock the hotel manager had to cut off! 

Here’s the Toot Bus (a low emissions bus). Lol.

En francaise for mon petit etudiant.

Il y a beaucoup de circulations. Nous ecouter beaucoup police sirenes, motos rapides, et beaucoup de pietons.

Grandmere et Grandpere nous rappelling notre epoque et nos opinions a Stockholm. 

Votre aide avec le francaise c’est tres importante. Merci, Lucas. (And Grammy apologizes for all of the grammatical errors and missing accents in French.)

There is so much traffic here in the core of Paris. It reminds us of Stockholm where we could watch all forms of transportation converge in one spot. This time we have no views out of our room but it’s only a short walk to go and be in the midst of it all. Yet we seem to be uniquely located in a quiet, neighborhood; a fairly non-touristy area, full of local employees heading off to their jobs and some smaller hotels. 

The Seine River. Loads of interesting boats for Grandpa to watch.

Louis Vuitton building.
The architectural details shimmer in the sunlight reflections.

A sign for my French language lovers.

Grampy near l’Arc de Triomphe.