living history

In Paris, history is alive.  You can feel the buzz of vitality as you walk her streets and enter her squares.  As you walk into a square, the streets reverberate with the noises of 18th century life.  You can imagine courtesan women with their coachmen, dukes on their horses, members of clergy visiting families and intrigue all around.

Living in Saint Germain des Pres, we can’t walk out our door without experiencing history on a daily basis.  On these beautiful autumn days with our french windows open, we hear the bells of Saint-German eglise, the oldest church in Paris; walk past la petite chaise, the oldest restaurant in Paris, opened as an inn in 1680, Dumas wrote here, rue du Bac was the 18th century hub of artistic life as was St Germain in the early 20th century.  We sit at les Deux Margots or Cafe Flore and feel the creative vibes of some of greatest figures in modern literature.

People want to know what to do with children in Paris?  The answer simple–anything.  A recent Wednesday afternoon, little dude, little buddha, and i went to musee d’Orsay.  Sketch pads in hand, their instructions were simple: pick an artist or piece of art to research.  Within no time, they had both found a painting and a sculpture they wanted to research.  We sat for a while and they sketched taking in the atmosphere of this gargantuan, history filled place.  We bought postcards of the pieces they chose to investigate and walked home with the Parisian commuters on a beautiful Wednesday evening in awe of the amount of history and art and culture one city holds.

Little Dude chose le chat noir as his painting, so we set out later in the week to Montmarte to see the village where Théophile Alexandre Steinlen painted and the cabarets, Moulin Rouge, etc after reading about Steinlen and the scene on Montmartre at the turn of the last century.  While there, we went to the Montmartre cemetary and saw Dumas’ grave (which is now actually in the Pantheon) because Fishy has been reading Count of Monte Cristo and doing a project on Dumas.

Little Dude and little buddha are also doing a project on a french car and for that there is the Cite des Sciences et de l’Industrie where you can investigate french auto design.

Your choices are really endless and all you really need is a bit of imagination and patience and history comes alive.  You don’t need to take a side trip to Disneyland Paris when real life history is so colorful and exciting.