Oh, my. This will require several parts. Unfortunately our camera is charging now and has been batteryless all weekend, so I have no new pictures to add. I'll make it up. Speaking of gazelles (and blog pictures), how'd you like that cornflake video?

So Sunday was a good day. We ate some bread, we got on a train, we went to the highest point in Paris. It's actually a cemetery in Belleville that you've probably never heard of. It is also the site of the first French visual telegraph, dating back to 1792.

We started at the Belleville metro stop, and found ourselves in a pretty impressive Chinatown. Well, more of a multinational Asiatown, edging more and more into Arabtown as you head up the hill. There were tons of restaurants and shops that looked delicious and very authentic. They even looked too authentic for us in some cases (Jonathan is pretty sure he saw canned camel meat in one window). There are also a lot of workshops that will build you custom furniture and so forth that looks to be of surprisingly good quality for its prices. As you head up the hill, it gets more and more low-rent, but there are also more really good artists' ateliers and high-end handmade-goods shops. The weirdness of the mix peaks when you get to the viewing point overlooking the Parc de Belleville, find yourself facing a better view than you had from Sacre Coeur, l'Arc de Triomphe, or the Tour Eiffel, and then realize that you are also standing next to a public housing building.

The park is gorgeous, even with the fountains turned off for winter. There's a museum about air (the Maison de l'Air) that looked to have all sorts of air-related toys spinning and flying around inside, as well as some genuinely informative exhibits. I found myself thinking, as I often do, "What a great place to take a slightly older child." The parc is terraced into a hillside, and is, like the last Parisian park we visited, easily in the top ten parks we've ever seen. Plus it had the most amazing playground, also terraced into several levels of hillside, that we have ever seen. Hands-down the best playground in the world. Indescribable, really--terraced levels of castles, sound holes, slides that send you diving through the earth to the next level, banked walls for running up the hillside, climbing walls on every possible surface, tangles of wooden beams to climb up and down on...

We realized belatedly that we should really have gotten off at Telegraphe at the top of the hill and started with the cemetery, then walked down through the park and Chinatown. Oh well.

I want to stay because 1) Paris has the best parks, 2) Paris has the best (and most) playgrounds, 3) How cool is it to put up public housing with the best view in the city?, and 4) The Arts et Metiers metro stop is set up to look like the brass-lined inside of a giant submarine.

I want to leave because 1) The wheelchair/stroller accessibility of public transportation is not even good enough to be a joke, 2) Even the best French playgrounds have no swings, and 3) there are some really, really awful women's fashions going around here right now. There's an atrocious haircut that's basically a modified super-chunky mullet (short chunks on top and on the sides, long underneath and in the back), a disgusting vest made of poufy chunks of rabbit fur ostentatiously stitched together to look as stupid as possible, and a resurgence of the boots-over-jeans look that takes us right back to the worst of the '80s. And you know what? It's still the case that only Australian cowboys can pull off wearing boots over their jeans. Parisian women certainly can't.

Just wait till you hear Monday's reasons.