Goodbye, Paris!

So, as you have probably been able to glean from the last few posts, all of us were wearing out a bit. Paris was becoming less exciting as we got more tired. Saturday, our last day was rainy and cold, so we spent the morning in front of our computers, the kids playing around and Ed and I working. Around lunchtime, Mary asked if there was any way there was still time to see the Fragonard Veterinary museum, a museum I had been trying to avoid. But we left Dad and the other kids at home and set out in the deluge to find the School of Veterinary Medicine. The museum was difficult to find, hidden away inside the walled campus. It housed the extensive collection of Dr. Fragonard of preserved corpses and body parts from the late 18th century. He created this collection for educational purposes, but it was frankly quite creepy to me and smelled of some sort of chemical. Mary was fascinated, but that's not surprising from the girl who wants to study viruses because they are nature's zombies. I have to admit that as a whole the collection was pretty amazing. But I was also grossed out.

The preserved skeleton, tendons and muscles of both horse and rider.

Deformed lambs. This is Mary's "I'm creepy and it makes you nervous" face.

A preserved fetus, with limbs arranged as if it were dancing. This was the creepy stuff.

An ad for Disneyland in the Metro.

When Mary and I got back, the rain had stopped so we all went to see the Grecian temple and caves at Bois de Vincennes. When we got there it started to downpour again, and a number of other people also attempted to take shelter in the temple. There was a friendly group of four young adults, one of whom was very pregnant, so we offered to give them a ride (since Ed could drive our van almost up to the temple). It turned out that the pregnant woman had been an Assyriology student in Leiden with Ed's colleagues, so we had a particularly friendly chat with them as we drove them to their metro station.

Ed insisted that we needed to see the Champs Elysee and the Arc de Triomphe (both of which were beautiful) before we left Paris, primarily because he wanted to drive around the traffic circle like Homer Simpson, stuck going around and around and never able to get out. We eventually did get out, but due to traffic it took us quite awhile to get back home. We stopped to get dinner's pizza and breakfast's groceries, and got home in time to drop the kids in bed before the landlord came over to check us out. We had to tell him we broke a lamp and four drinking glasses, and we lost the remote to the DVD player, but he was only worried about the kids wetting the mattresses, which gratefully they hadn't. He was very generous and should have asked us for some money, but he is just a kind man. I highly recommend his home, if you are ever in Paris with 5 or more people. I took some short videos of the place. (These are for you, Brenda.)