Le fabuleux destin des MacKinnons

the red arrow is Yolanda on our balcony

Paris (week 36)

We dropped the car off and took the train into Paris for our final 2 days in France.  We decided to get a hotel in the heart of it all, and found a reasonable Aparthotel literally a stone's throw from the Moulin Rouge.  Obviously the area was bustling late into the night, and not all of the surrounding shops and watering holes are kid-friendly, but it's a neat area full of boulangeries and little restaurants.  It's also lived-in with lots of schoolchildren in the morning and laundromats and grocery stores dotted around.

David with a David, "Pierre Sériziat"

The night we arrived we entered the first reasonable restaurant we saw.  We discovered we were in the Deux Moulins, the location of Amélie's workplace in the film of the same name.  The next day we went to the Louvre (standing in line for 45 minutes, directly behind a school group from Thunder Bay's Hammarskjold High School - Yolanda recognised one of the chaperones).  David and Andrew could only last an hour, although they did manage to see the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace, among others.  Yolanda continued for another couple of hours in the Louvre while the (three) boys moved on to Cinéaqua, the Paris aquarium.  It was similar to the other large aquariums we saw (including reef sharks!) in Barcelona and Toronto, but it was still interesting and contained some new things we hadn't seen before.

So, our (final) updated aquarium list is as follows:

1, 2. Canada (Ripley's Toronto & Lunenburg Fisheries Museum)
3, 4. USA (Clearwater & Duluth)
5, 6, 7. France (Cité de la Mer Cherbourg, Limoges, & Cinéaqua Paris)
8. Spain (Barcelona)
9. Monaco
10. Italy (Genoa)
11. Belgium (Brussels Public)