Going to Paris…virtually

In Day 2 of our touring the world virtually, we went to France. I wasn’t ‘officially’ working today, but as I’m sure some of you are experiencing, working from home means less boundaries on time. I’m still working on that…

We started off our day with breakfast – a tube of crescents that I popped some mini chocolate chips inside. When my husband and I went to Paris in 2007, we ate that every day for breakfast – though it is highly unlikely that they were crescents from a tube!

Next, we toured my scrapbook from our trip so the girls could see what we did – touring Paris, Normandy, Reims, and Versailles/Monet’s gardens. Wormy got super excited to see that we went to see the real Water Lillies paintings in Paris, as they had just made their own versions of that art in her kindergarten art class. Then she was over the moon when we showed her our pictures from Monet’s actual gardens. Now she wants to go in person.

We moved on to some virtual tours. We visited my favorite stop when we were in Paris – the Water Lillies exhibit in Musee de l’Orangerie: https://www.musee-orangerie.fr/en/article/water-lilies-virtual-visit The girls loved imagining themselves sitting on the benches soaking in the whole work!

Next up, we visited the Louvre virtually through this site: https://www.youvisit.com/tour/louvremuseum Wormy kept laughing whenever the sculptures didn’t have arms! They really liked looking at the glass pyramid from the outside and then when it was the ceiling above us.

Our last virtual tour was of the Eiffel Tower. This tour wasn’t quite as good, as it is actually just a view from the sky above the Eiffel Tower. However, we did have fun zooming in on the tower itself, as you could distinctly see the two viewing platforms with people on them. We also were able to find many of Paris’s landmarks from the views, so that was pretty neat, too. I know there are a lot of different links for this, so here’s the one we found: https://www.360cities.net/image/view-from-the-eiffel-tower. If you don’t like that one, or are looking for others, just pop it into Google.

Since I had 6 years of French between high school and college, I taught the girls how to count to 20, and we had a conversation consisting of greetings, how are you, and how to ask and answer what their names are. I also taught them a cute counting rhyme (“un-deux-trois, ou est le roi?”) and we listened to some French music from my collection. My husband busted out his National Guard berets, and the girls put those on. They were adorable! I had them dress in red, white, and blue, as those are the colors of the French flag, as well.

We talked about the Euro, and I showed them pictures of the paper money and coins. We compared what they use vs what we have (they use coins for 1 and 2 euros instead of paper, their coins are different denominations, etc). I just used Wikipedia for this, as it had a great picture.

My husband and I made chicken crepes for lunch and we had to make dessert crepes as well. The girls LOVED them. Thank goodness I have an awesome crepe maker my mother-in-law got me for Christmas a long time ago. That thing is AWESOME and so easy! We also had sparkling cider, since wine and champagne are big exports for France. The girls said they felt pretty fancy. They even said “Merci” after the meal.

After lunch, we watched “Ratatouille” since that movie takes place in France. This counted as our down time for the day! The girls got some playing in outside while my husband and I were cooking the crepes. I was going to have them play boule (bocci ball for all of you non-French types), but we ran out of time today since we took a walk instead.