Paris in the Fall

It's early Saturday morning and Scott and I are in the midst of  the fits and starts of mild jet-lag, which strikes at its worst at 4am, coincidentally just around the time drunk Parisiennes are wandering home singing.

We're happily ensconced for the week in a petit apartment (tres petit, and at the top of three rickety flights of stairs), equidistant from Les Halles and the surrounding pedestrian market streets; and Le Marais, one of Paris' oldest neighbourhoods with a small-scale medieval layout, deep and varied history and fantastic shopping :)

Yesterday, our first full day in the City of Light, we chose to be all cultural-like and headed for the Musee Carnavalet in the Marais, a museum devoted to the history of Paris. It's a charming museum located in two old mansions (or 'hotels'), with a collection chock-full of revolutionary oil paintings of death and destruction. Luckily, there's also some beautiful manicured courtyards, some cool 18th century signage and quirky street-scene dioramas which keep the session from getting too bleak.

Later, we took in more planned culture of a different kind: a wine tasting, held a few blocks from the Louvre in an underground wine cellar professed to be constructed on the orders of one of the King Louis - XIV or XV, not sure which. Later on, they took out the wine and locked up prisoners there (Paris does have some bleak history, I'll give you that).

But onto the wines: on a whirlwind tour of this country's vineyards, we tasted and noisily slurped from six different regions (Champagne, Sancerre, Burgundy, Bordeaux, Rhone and one other I can't remember after five glasses.) Our chatty guide, a Montreal-born sommelier and winemaker, was charming and knowledgeable and I think we even learned a few things.

We emerged from the underground cavern into an early evening, and wandered across the courtyards of the Louvre towards a quiet sunset. And then remembered that it was the day of our 5th anniversary. Spent perfectly.