Last Saturday was our last day in France.

We started the day off with a little clothes shopping. I had a simple ham and cheese baguette sandwich as a pre-lunch snack. Tasty. We also checked out BHV, a several story high department store. For lunch we had pizza again with Kir Royales to celebrate the end of the trip. Then we walked over to what was marked on the map as the History of France Museum, and which turned out to be a part of the National Archives that were no longer on display to the public. Oh well.

So we moseyed over to the Musée Picasso and enjoyed looking at some more modern art, though still feeling fatigued after the previous day’s Louvre experience. I did get the impression that Picasso was crazy talented, crazy creative, crazy prolific, and that taken together, his work almost doesn’t make sense.

After that it was nearing 5pm, and we had dinner plans with one Miss Katie Melville of London, a friend from my undergraduate days in Linguistics. Katie met us at our hotel, after having had her hair cut (the other reason she was in Paris). We walked over to Pierre Hermé, a patisserie with a line out the door that looked more like a parfumerie than a pastry shop. She wanted to share with us their marzipan cookies, and we also got some chocolate treats.

After a little sit down with our pastries at a nearby cafe, we took the metro to Oberkampf to find our dinner location, a recommended North African restaurant called “La Tagine” with dishes served appropriately in… tagines. Katie invited two of her Paris-based friends along, one an American (or at least she had an American English accent) and the other a Brit. I had a lovely time, if not for the fact that I could more fully participate in the conversation.

We closed the place down, four of us heading home together on the same metro line, before saying our final goodbyes in the 15 seconds we had to get off the train at our connection.

And then the trip was over.

We transfered to the metro line we needed, and then walked arm-in-arm back to the hotel. It was past midnight, I’m sure. We did some packing and left some for the morning which would be coming too early. Our flight departed at 10am, which meant we were waking at 6.