Today was one of the days that I really need to write about to fully convey the wonderfullness of our experience here. We didn't DO anything really big. Our morning plans were to go to the Luxembourg gardens and see if Emma's mittens had shown up. Which is what we did, despite the drizzle, but hey it is still winter here so... We rode on the RER to Luxembourg and wandered through the lovely park. Nobody was sailing boats on the pond, and only a few children were playing in the pay-per-playground, but the jardin is really lovely so the walk through the bare trees and statues was nice. No mittens, but on the way out we passed the National Assembly, which is in the former Medici palace (built in 1630) and a statue of one of the queens of France, who had reigned in the 1300s. 1300s. Its hard to think about that, much less try to explain it to Emma. (Okay, daddy is almost 40 so that is like 10 daddys, well no that's not quite it...) After that we wandered through the St. Germain/Latin Quarter past St. Surplice (which we know all about after reading the really dreadful "The da Vinci code" which had all sorts of interesting information about the deeply pagan nature of many of the features) and onto rue Buci. rue Buci turned out to be a gem of a street. Narrow, winding, packed with great little stores and trateurs and gelato. Although it was cold enough to be wearing gloves and for us to see occasional snowflakes, we decided that the gelato looked good enough to warrant freezing even more. It was. We had grilled pannini for lunch, followed by gelato and eclairs. Lovely way to spend a morning.