At Last, a Fabulous Kids' Museum!

It's not really at last, since we did go to the same museum our first weekend here, but on that visit we A) did not know that you needed to make a reservation for a specific 90 minute time slot, and B) that if you show up on a Saturday morning the chances of getting said slot before dinner are nil. So on that day we wandered around the science museum being surprised that a major national capital had such a lame science museum.

Yet, not to be discouraged, we decided to try again. The kid's school had a day off today, a staff workshop, not a big holiday, so we decided to take Jake and Sedi to La Cité des Enfants, the children's section of the Science Museum. What a difference. It was fantastic. Perhaps the best children's museum we've ever been to. It has 2 sections one fore 3-5 and one for 5-12. It's a good thing Sedi is tallish and can pass for 3 around here. A full-on construction area with hard hats and vests where the kids push wheelbarrows of rubberized "bricks" and trains (complete witht a kid-operable crossing guard station) and load them up and down using buckets on pulleys then can fit the different sized-bricks together to make walls, roofs etc. A machine where they use levers and wheels to move the parts that then move a ball through a maze. A scorpion that you can climb inside of an operate its claws and a kangaroo who's pouch you can crawl into and pretend to be a joey. And this is about 1/30th of what was there. Jake and Sedi both had an excellent time. And while it was a 40 minute metro ride the first time around, it's just 15 minutes from our apartment by car. We will be back for sure!!

We then lunched at a ubiquitous Hippopotamus restaurant which, turned out to have adequate food and was over-the-top kid friendly: a goody bag for each kid, a nice steak frites with applesauce for dessert and a self-contained kids play area where we could watch the kids play while we relaxed at the table.