Paris, Tuesday, November 20, 2007:

Tuesday was the only day it outright rained. It didn't rain all day and it wasn't as cold as the Sunday we were there, which was worse because of the wind. Here we are in front of a monument to Napoleon III but plaques have been added to it to serve as a war memorial for the two world wars as well.

We stopped here to see if the Metro was running -- there's one right under the monument -- and there were some trains running, but there was not full service. We were headed to the Orsay, an Impressionist museum that is housed in a magnificent former train station. When we got there, we were told that two of the three floors of the museum were closed due to the civil servants who work there being on strike. That was the first that I heard that it wasn't just the transit workers, but civil servants in general. It turns out that this Tuesday had been designated a national strike day. When we were at this memorial we heard a tiny parade and saw people carrying placards, although we could see what they said. We also saw an long parade of very fancily dressed men on horseback -- we think they were police.

We decided that it wasn't worth staying at the Orsay because it was almost all closed. So we decided we'd go to Le Bon Marche, the world's first department store, started in 1869.

We got lost on the way there and were looking at a map. A very nice woman stopped, in the rain, to ask if she could tell us how to get where we were going. The traffic was unbelievable -- absolutely stopped with the police blocking intersections for seemingly no reason, people getting mad, etc. We were walking, of course, but on a tiny, narrow street and so had to dodge the traffic a bit when there were other people on the sidewalk.

We saw this stove store on the way there. Amazing stoves, but a bit heavy to get home.

Jim really wants a Smart Car. They are due out here in 2008, but I think they are bug shaped because that's how they'd be squashed by a tractor trailer on an interstate. They look like the perfect city car, though, and they're incredibly cute.

When we got to Le Bon Marche, we strolled through the very expensive designer departments, of which there were many. Then we strolled over to the less expensive departments.