Four days in Paris?

What will we do with four whole days in Paris? First and foremost, we want to:

• Stroll along the Seine. If it’s good enough for Sisley, Turner, Renoir, and Monet, . . .
• Spend an hour or two (or four or six) in a Parisian Cafe
• Browse the open-air markets
• Wander through Ile de la Cité's Flower Market
• Drink tea and eat sweets at a tea salon (or as we cosmopolites say, un salon de thé)
• Eat some good food

Now that probably won't take the entire four days (although at our age, it just might). Anyway, we suspect that these are the sorts of things we're likely to remember afterwards, much more so than the cathedrals and monuments.

When we think back on other trips that we've taken, we find ourselves remembering things like:

• a nighttime walk along the Danube and over the Chain Bridge in Budapest
• the view from a rooftop cafe, looking down over Naples and the bay to Vesuvius
  
• a seaside cafe in Greece where we discovered ouzo while marveling at how the waiters dodged traffic as they ferried drinks and food from the kitchen on the other side of the busy street.

If we do have any time left over, we'll probably follow a what-to-see-and-do list that my friend Arthur (it is Arthur, right?) Frommer lays out. After much pruning, his three-day itinerary amounts to something like this:

• The Louvre
• Sainte-Chapelle
• Notre-Dame
• Place de la Concorde
• Arc de Triomphe
• Eiffel Tower

• Ile St-Louis
• Musée d'Orsay
• Hotel des Invalides/Napoleon's Tomb
• Bateaux-Mouche Cruise of the Seine
• Basilique du Sacré-Coeur
• Place de la Concorde

• Versailles
• Centre Pompidou
• Place des Vosges
• Rue des Rosiers
• Montparnasse

Even after pruning, this looks to me to be a very busy few days. (Old Art is in much better shape than I am if he can spend the morning walking the hard marble floors of a museum and still have enough energy, to say nothing of a back free of pain, to spend the rest of the day walking the city's hard concrete sidewalks.) So, I don't know if we'll come close to doing all of that stuff, but I don't really care, either. I would very much like to see Sainte-Chapelle and the Pompidou Centre; after that, we'll just do what we feel like doing at the moment.