Discovering a Paris "Passage"

We had another day left on the L'OpenTour bus tickets (it's 32Euro for 1 day and 4Euro more for another day, so it only made sense), so we decided to make practical use of it albeit briefly.

Using my trusty Metro app, we took the Metro to the Grand Boulevards area (Bld Montmartre, a touristy spot) and found the Passage Jouffrey that Molly's friend had told her about.

As a side note, we grabbed a McDonald's pop first (wink-wink @ Kelly). In Paris, you can order your food on a touchscreen kiosk much like how we can go into the movie theaters now and buy/print tickets at the kiosk and then you walk up to the counter and pick up your order. As well, McDonald's are clean and I don't recall hearing the annoying "meeeeeeeep meeeeeeeeep" of a fry basket ready to be removed from oil--am I right??

Oh also, before took the Metro we stopped in at Monoprix and I tried to find conditioner. Here's a tip: French bottles don't say "Conditioner" and don't immediately sit arm in arm with the shampoos that they compliment. They say "apres-shampooing". So a quick scan of the shelves and all you see is "shampoo" in all the product packaging.

So anyways...we found the Passage which is open to the street, but is like a covered alley with stores and restaurants lining each side. Some of them may be multi-level; we're going to check out Passage du Grand Cerf which apparently is close to home tomorrow and is two levels.

They're also referred to as "arcades" and are probably the first indoor malls.

We came upon Le Bistrot and had to sit down and soak it all in. I had trouble with the menu as there are some things on the menus here that I didn't recognize and the waitress did not speak much English. I had a delicious French lunch of turkey covered in mushrooms and a cream-based sauce, white potatoes and salad in another type of dressing, accompanied by a glass of red wine and some pieces of baguette and butter.

The whole experience was made absolutely wonderful by this trio of performers who showed up:

Later, we hopped on the L'OpenTour bus and rode it until the Louvre. We were allowed through the "reserved ticket" line without having reserved tickets. When we did stand in line for tickets, we were about 6th in line at about 5pm. My primary interest was seeing the Mona Lisa, anything else would be wonderful. Unfortunately the Louvre is not very accessible and there are a lot of marble stairs leading up to some things people would probably want to see. I personally shouldn't be doing stairs right now unless necessary and my Gran was also not enjoying the stairs and the large tour groups and people crossing hither and thither. So we decided to leave having seen what we wanted to see and headed home, both of us tired. I'm not a big fan of museums mostly because I could never get into history. I'm not trained in looking with an educated eye at art, so a lot of it looks the same as the next. It was a good idea to just pay as we go.