Cluny Museum & Reservations Rebooked & Cancelled, Sept 29

 Sept 29

    We started the day with our daily croissants from down the road.

    We walked to the Cluny Museum, a museum of Medieval Art in the heart of the 5th. It combines a Roman frigidarium (part of a Roman bath), 15th Century Hotel de Cluny, the mansion of the Abbey of Cluny.

St Barbara!

The Lady with the Unicorn

    It is definitely a WOW! place. Just the building is amazing.

   Art hails from Europe, Byzantium and the Islamic world. We took SO many awesome photos that it is hard to cull them for the blog.

     A  highlight was definitely the room devoted to the six tapestries made in the 15th Century called "The Lady With the Unicorn." Five are devoted to the senses of - touch, smell, hearing, taste and sight. The sixth is somewhat a mystery, but perhaps refers to a possible sixth sense dealing with the emotions and the heart.

A 15th Century woman teaching math

    From there, we walked to the Pantheon and to Le Cafe de la Nouvelle Mairie where we ate two years ago with Claudia and Michael and Nancy. We sat outside this time. Mark had a sausage dish and Barbara had a white fish with a somewhat mild wasabi sauce.

   We strolled home.

    We had quite an adventure when we got back to our building. 

     We got stuck between floors in a TINY elevator at our old Parisian building! It was so small that we barely could stand next to each other.  There was a yellow emergency button which we pushed and got a person who was hard to hear or understand, even though Barbara asked her to speak slowly so we could understand. We did give the address of the building and then she hung up. We had no idea if help was en route as we could not understand her response. We called back a few times as the minutes ticked away and got the impression that help would eventually come. Of course, it was rush hour, so we worried that it would be hours before anyone showed up.

Chapel Ceiling

    We took turns sitting down, sort of between the other person's legs. The standing person straddled the other one of us. We shudder to think what it would have been like if it had been stiflingly hot. And, of course, our phones wouldn't work in the elevator shaft! We periodically banged the door. Eventually a man who lives in the building heard us and he then called the elevator people which was a relief as he spoke at length and in French, of course. He assured us that help would come in about half an hour..... he hoped. (We'd already been there about that long.) 

   At any rate, a technician did come and opened the door. We were between floors and he helped the two stiff old people to clamber out.  So - on Saturday we had to walk with our luggage down 2 flights of winding stairs and then another narrow, but straight flight. Luckily we travel light, but it was still a challenge.

Today we  got the news that Alice, Marks' Mom, has taken a turn for the worse and is entering hospice care and end of days. We spent the next 4 hours (!) on the phone and online trying to change our Delta flight, as well as cancel our train tickets for the next 2 weeks. (Paris to Nimes, Nimes to Lyon, Lyon to Charles de Gaulle.) 

  The plane took the longest as we could never connect with a person. For a while it looked like we would have to totally rebook for a lot of $ ($9000). Eventually, Mark got a supervisor who waved his wand and got us on a flight for Sunday in Premium Economy as we'd have traveled on October 12. 

The elevator where we got stuck

   Barbara got hold of AAA in Acton, MA and the wonderful woman there who had booked our trains, managed to get us full refunds for two of the tickets, but not the one that was supposed to be for tomorrow. 

     We also managed to change our reservation for the Sheraton at the airport. The only dead loss will be the VRBO in Lyon which we are too late to cancel. But, as we have trip insurance, we hope to recoup that.

      All in all, we went to bed exhausted, but successful.