Amsterdam in Paris - Windmills and bikes! (oh and of course the Tour de France!)

This past weekend we had friends from England come to Paris and hang out with us. We found ourselves eating in cafes and drinking at places like the la Moulin Vert (The Green Mill) near our home and then traveling over to Montmatre in search of the Twin Windmill Bar featured in Amelie and stroll by the homes of the artists that started 20th century modern art such as Renoir, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Picasso. There is still a vineyard here and there were even grapes on the vine. We took a break at The Old Windmill sports bar to sit, have a drink and watch the Tour de France on the tele. The Spanish team was posing for the cameras with their arms on each other. The tele showed us other events around town celebrating the Tour de France - such as the Vendigos zoomming around Paris! This a bike service you can subscribe to and then rent a bike in one place, ride around for 25 minutes and then return it at another location. J. and I tried our best to figure out how to subscribe to the Vendigo Paris bikes but our credit card is missing a very important component - a chip. Without this chip we unable to use our credit card for many things like buying train tickets and sadly subscribing to the bikes :( Our friends showed us their cards with the chips in it and I am still not sure exactly how it works. It's some silver diamond shape thing on the front of the card and in one of them it's splitting. Since they were only in Paris for two days it would not work for them to subscribe to the Paris bikes with their chipped credit cards. After catching up with the Tour de France and finishing our cool drinks, we ended our own tour of Montmatre at the La Moulin Rouge. Where we watched all the tourist take funny pictures of themselves. It's wee bit expensive to see a show here so we hopped the metro over to the Arc de Triomphe and popped out just in time to see the Tour de France bike racers do a few spins around the Champs Elysee. The race announcer was very excited as the French biker was winning this stage. I think this is mostly likely the best place to see the race because anywhere else along the route they just whiz by in a few seconds and that's that. On the Champs Elysee you can snuggle your way into the crowd and get a peak of the racers and their entourage of cars whiz by a few times. Some of those double decker tourist buses stopped in the circle by the Arc de Triomphe to let the folks watch the race from up high and they had a great spot to see all the action. Other folks climbed light posts and quite a few people brought step ladders. I would think some enterprising youngster could charge a few euros and let people take turns from these viewing points. It was a great ride!