POI:

• Bastille
• Victor Hugo’s House
• Carnavalet Museum
• Picasso Museum
• Sacre-Caur
• Moulin Rouge

We planned to follow one of those self walking tours in the guide book today and took the Metro to the Bastille stop, which was only about 5 or 6 stops away from our hotel. The Paris streets were so irregular that it was pretty difficult to follow along the map, but we somehow found our way (by following other tourists and see where they were going).

We passed by the Victor Hugo’s House, even though we weren’t exactly sure where his house really was since we just saw one big garden. On the map it says that we are at his house, but we just see a bunch of little shops and people’s homes. Maybe all these shops/homes were originally his house?

We stopped by the Carnavalet Museum, which got Jeannie really excited since this was the only free museum of the whole trip. It wasn’t a small museum either since we spent a good bit of time wondering around in its awesome free-ness.

Picasso Museum was just a short walk away from the Carnavalet Musuem and was our main focus of the day. It was certainly a very interesting walk in the museum as we learned about the various stages of Picasso’s work and the different art formats that he experimented. It was kinda sad to learn that he didn’t really get famous (and rich) until his death and he lived a relatively not-so-rich life. We had fun looking through the displays.

It was still early when we finished touring Picasso Museum so we decided to take the Metro to the Sacre-Caur, which is a big white church on top of a hill that people can see from miles away around Paris. “It’s on a hill” = more stairs! It was an impressive building with amazing artwork on the ceiling and I would definitely recommand this place for any “religious buffs”.

Looking at the map, we noticed that Moulin Rouge was just a few blocks away and decided to just walk there - Bad Decision! Little did we know that we had to walk through the Paris’ Red Light District… While the various sex shops and sex museums were certainly interesting, Jeannie got sidetracked by a group of people playing the Shell Game (A guy shuffling 3 cards and you have to pick the right one)… After watching a while, this happened:
Jack: “Let’s go, they cheat people.”
Jeannie: “This one!” (Pointing at one card after one guy picked the wrong card)
Dealer: “The money is yours! Show me your money and flip the card!”
Jack: “Uhh… No Jeannie, let’s go…”
Jeannie: “I am sure it’s this one, just try.”
Jack: (Opening the wallet) “I only have a $50 bill”
Dealer: (Takes the $50 bill from Jack’s hand and flips the card Jeannie was pointing)
What do you think happened?

So out of $50 Euro and feeling kinda upset/stupid, we continued our walk to Moulin Rouge. After some discussion, we later decided that the other 2 “players” must be working with the dealer to create the illusion that the game was easy (since we later saw several other groups of the same setup). I guess the $50 bought us a story to tell… Oh and along the way some “friendly” French woman said hi to us in Chinese and wanted us to go watch some nude girls at the nudie bar. We declined since we basically just wanted to get out of there.

We got to the Moulin Rougue and took some pictures that we wanted and got outa there ASAP. We had to stop by ATM on the way home since we had just been had.

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