In France, school children get two weeks of vacation every six weeks. For the vancances d’hiver, at the end of February, we spent our first week skiing. H needed to be back in Paris to work for the second week so the girls and I decided we would use the holiday time to cross some items off of our sabbatical year bucket list. This meant planning an outing or activity for each day. These are our highlights:

La Nocturne du Samedi at the Louvre

The Louvre started a new initiative, opening it’s doors to visitors for free on the first Saturday night of the month. As an Amie du Louvre (after my first visit I bought a membership card that allows me to come and go as many times as I would like in the year) I signed up ahead of time to give us access to a special entrance and programming. The doors opened at 6PM and when we arrived at about 6:30PM, the regular line-up to enter was snaked around the museum, up and out the stairs. We made our way to the “special entrance” and were inside within five minutes. Membership has its privileges!

It was magical to experience the Louvre without the crowds. Sculptures glowed in the early evening light in vast rooms with only us and a few other people in them. Though the line-up to get in was long, the museum itself felt largely empty. There were queues for the visites à la torche, where you could be guided through an exhibit in the dark with a flashlight. There were also concerts available, different kids activities using art, books and games and many guides available to answer questions. I learned afterwards that the guides came from the Ecole du Louvre which may have explained their enthusiasm: we were incredibly impressed with a young woman who gave us an impromptu, half-hour semi-private experience explaining the linkages between archeology and bande-dessinée or comic books. We chose to avoid all the line-ups and seek out the quietest areas. We discovered the code du Hammunrabi and Sophia became absorbed trying to decipher the legal code from the 18th century B.C. engraved on the tablets. Our favourite discovery was Napoleon III’s apartments, the over-the-top ornate rooms built for Napoleon III, including the state dining room which could easily host dinner for 50 and some chandeliers that are larger than most people’s kitchens in Paris.

American Library in Paris

I am 100% confident that when girls look back on their time here, one the places that they will remember most fondly will be the American Library in Paris. We discovered it during our first week in the city and have returned two to four times a month ever since. It is a haven of English books and English speakers. Sometimes we bring a picnic lunch on a Wednesday when the girls have a half-day of school and we spend the whole afternoon looking for and reading books. A trip to the library was essential during our vacation week, not only because they needed to stock up on things to read, but also because it is the first thing they mention when I ask, “what should we do today?”. I negotiated that we would spend a morning at the library, in English, if we could commit to something more ambitious, in French, for the afternoon.

L’Atelier des Sens

I have been blown away by the number and scope of activities offered to children in Paris. They come in form of ateliers and they are essentially two to three hour-long experiences kids can participate in, led by engaging instructors. You find ateliers at all of the museums. They are typically available on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons as well as during the school vacations. There are also cooking, art and sewing schools that offer specialized ateliers and businesses that specialize in them and you can choose from a roster including coding, circus, theatre, English lessons, and many, many others. Other than English lessons, they are all offered in French. This makes complete sense as they are designed for French school children and families, but it means that our girls have been reluctant to participate as they were not sure their language skills would be good enough to, in the worst case, avoid catastrophe and, in the best case, actually enjoy the activity. 

Sophia’s birthday gift this year was a cooking class she would do together with me. When we were choosing it, I pointed out that we could do the “tourist classes” in English or the “authentic classes” in French. My brave girl chose the French and so we signed up for a morning of making homemade pasta and bolognaise sauce and nutella cookies. The experiment was a success and hoping to motivate the girls to make the leap into French ateliers, I found one at the same cooking school. In two hours, they would make madeleines, financiers and mini-muffins. I was so sure they would love it that I bought five hours worth of lessons for the bulk discount. When I came to pick them up they were sitting with another girl from the class, full of smiles. Sophia told me they had chatted in French the whole time. They were both so proud to bring home a box of their creations. 

Marché du Tissu

At Mavis’s request, one of our planned outings for the week was to go to the fabric stores in the Montmarte area to buy materials for her to make clothes for her Barbie dolls. 

Before exploring the square at the base, filled with fabric stores, Mavis and I walked up the hill to Sacre Coeur and, for the first time, actually went inside the church. We did not pay to go to the dome where we’ve been told that the views are spectacular. We instead looked down on Paris from the outside of the basilica to see what buildings and monuments we were able to recognize and were pleased that our list had grown considerably from our first visit the previous summer.

We returned to the Place St. Pierre, the home of Montmarte’s fabric stores. Here, the streets are an endless row of shops overflowing with fabrics and some specializing in buttons, bows and every possible sewing related bobble. We admired the vast quantity of fabric bolts in every color, style and price range you could imagine. Then we headed to the bins which sell small sized fabric pieces, or coupons, that you can buy for anywhere from one to five euros each. Mavis managed to find a number of pieces she thought would suit her Barbie dolls well and one she thought would make a good shirt for herself.  We replenished her with a freshly made crèpe sucre citron and she agreed to participate in some “random wandering” through the streets of Montmarte before heading home. 

Versailles

I had been to the Chateau Versailles with my parents when they were in town but the girls had yet to see it. The fact that we can get from our apartment to the chateau with such ease continues to astound me. Using our Navigo cards, we took the RER C to Versailles-Chateau-Rive-Gauche, a ride just under 30 minutes. We walked from the train station to the chateau imagining that we were French royalty in the 1800’s and approaching the Chateau in our carriage. This visit was much busier than my first which makes me realize that it really does make a difference when you arrive at 9:30AM versus 12:00PM. It is worth arriving early to avoid the crowds. We used the audio guide which I found interesting but which failed to impress the girls. Their description of the chateau was that it was “big” and “fancy” but not in a way that made you think that being big and fancy was a positive thing. Even the famous Hall of Mirrors failed to make much of an impression. They were more excited by the grounds: the open space had the effect it always does on them: they opened up like flowers and broke out running. Indeed, the scope of the gardens is striking. We lunched at the charming café, La Flottille. It was not fine dining but you cannot beat the location, looking out the window at the gardens of Versailles. The girls’ cheese pizza and my galette were lovely. As my objective for most outings is to “end on a high note” we ordered a banana split for the girls to share and it worked like a charm.

Centre Pompidou

We capped off the week with a visit to the Centre Pompidou. We have walked by this modern museum in the Marais many times and the girls have been intrigued by the colors, modern architecture and the escalator running up the outside of the building. When I went online to buy tickets I saw that they were offering ateliers for children and on a whim I decided to sign both girls up to participate… without telling them about it. While discussing the day’s schedule at breakfast, I said something about how we could plan to go the museum anytime but we’d like to be there at least a bit before 2PM. Sophia, always sharp, immediately asked me what was happening at 2PM. 

I had purposely said nothing about the atelier in order to minimize the time for complaining, but when I was put on the spot, I had to confess. Long story short: Mavis went to the altelier and Sophia explored the museum with me and H. Sophia felt quite redeemed when we went returned for Mavis who declared, thankfully with a smile and her good spirits intact, that the atelier had been awful and that she had hated it. We have a new agreement going forward: I will not sign them up for anything without getting permission beforehand and they will agree to start exploring some of the museum ateliers. 

The day before going back to school we reviewed the vacation and all gave it two thumbs up. Looking back at our week in the city, I was struck that the majority of our outings, with the exception of the day in Versailles, were not typical tourist experiences. We could not label our list, “the top ten things to do in Paris” and could not give it to visitors as a suggestion for the best outings. This pleased me. It means we are moving beyond the obvious sights and experiences and starting to dig a little deeper. Our goal is not to avoid the mainstream activities: we want to do it all. We have some obvious hits still on our list such as going up the Eiffel Tower and taking a Seine boat cruise. But I love that we are populating our memories with some more personal experiences too: ones that will help me, H and the girls to have our own relationship with Paris when it is time to say goodbye. With the winter vacation behind us we have started to think about what we want to do with the warmer weather. When we go back to Canada, I think we will have done most of the items in the guidebooks and I hope, as with this vacation, we will have added a few more chapters of our own.