Today was museum day!! We hit the ground running.. or.. slightly dragging and with one extra cup of coffee for us both just to keep our legs going. We wandered through a little street market around the corner from our hotel and walked past the Montparnasse cemetery where Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Porfirio Diaz, and some guy named Maurice LeBlanc (who must have been extra awesome) are buried. We believed some guy that told us an elevator was not working, so took some crazy back route to the Musee Jean Moulin. This was a museum dedicated to the French Resistance and underground. It was tiny and somewhat new (Chirac commissioned it while he was still mayor of Paris), but very impressive. We both learned quite a few things about what the French people went through during the German occupation. To borrow Lisa's words, it was interesting to learn French history NOT in America. :) It made us very thankful to be Americans, but also showed what people are capable of during hard times if they really believe in something. Really amazing.
On a lighter note, we forgot to mention yesterday that we stopped into a pet store on the Champs Elysees and got to sweet talk some puppies! Puppies in Paris!! One of them woke up for us and tried his little heart out to lick us through the window. It meant we were supposed to take him home. But, when sanity kicked in, Aimee just told him about how great his new French home would be and how they would tell him "bonjour" every day. I think we love him.
More meandering through neighborhoods, then we attempted to actually eat at Cafe Les Deux Magots (that we mentioned the other day). The word "attempted" was intentional. It is very clear that the pace here is very laid back, and we have tried to accept this. However, our mistake is in going to cafes when we are hungry. So, we drank water that was so overpriced we are not even going to mention it for fear of the lectures we will get from you, talked to the cutest old Australian guy EVER (He even said he had been here for a fortnight taking a writing course! A fortnight! No, really! He said it!), then bailed out and grabbed some really cheap crepes at a stand across the street. We ate them in the courtyard of the oldest church in Paris that the vikings reportedly sacked four times. We paid for the water. No worries.
We crossed a new bridge to get to the Louvre and spent quite a while there. The collection is very impressive, but the building itself might steal the show. There is a section at the very bottom that includes an excavated portion of the original palace of Charles V, which was built in the 1300's. We were able to walk through what used to be the dungeon and the moat! More things in America should have dungeons and moats. Just saying.
By the time we left, we were exhausted and our legs had almost locked up completely. However, this did not keep us from crossing the river and getting back to our neighborhood at a dead sprint. We barely stopped to wait for the signal that it is safe to cross the street. We attempted to eat our last dinner at a cafe that we decided earlier in the week was our favorite, but it ended up much like the Deux Magots experience. This time, though, we ducked into another cafe immediately across the street and had a fantastic and very appropriate last Parisian meal.
On that note, we must sign off and bid our Parisienne blog adieu. We should mention that there are millions of stories yet to tell that just couldn't fit in the blog, so you will all be hearing about them in person soon. Thanks for indulging us (this was really a great part of the trip!) and for keeping up with our adventures. This is sad for both of us, but it will be nice on some points to just get home. What a fantastic city! Now, back to Texas, where the cokes have ice and water costs less than a dollar!
God Bless America!
We're coming home!
All our best,
Lisa and Aimee
And one last random picture: 
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