An American in France: Days 6 et 7

Oh, to be young in Paris.  On day 6 of our journey, The Tableau Your Mind family left the Loire Valley, took a detour to Versailles, and ended up back where we started. Once in Paris, we tooled around the city, stopping at cafes, admiring a few bridges, darting in and out of train cars like the experts we had so quickly become. Though our day was short on

An American in France: Day 3

Quasimodo watches Paris burn.

It is Day 3 in Paris, and things are getting crazy. The many well-laid plans for the day were thrown aside, and the Tableau Your Mind family dabbled in spontaneity. Of course, this involved going to many well-marked and safe tourist attractions, but we went to them in a completely different order than the order we had planned. We started the day in Le Marais, which is apparently beautiful and fun and hip, but mostly it was just cafes and wholesale purse shops - in all honesty, we may have missed the hip Le Marais. Then, we were planning to head to the Louvre after the Centre Georges Pompidou, but, instead, we went to Notre Dame. Quelle Surprise!

When I think of the Notre Dame, I think of Indiana football and the classic Disney movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Since this is Tableau Your Mind and not Football Your Mind, let's focus on the Disney.  This 90s addition to the Disney family, based on a novel by Victor Hugo, is a wonderful and dramatic film, filled with religion and gypsies and repressed sexual desires. The villain, Judge Frollo, is the scariest cartoon character with