8 December 2025, Paris

We woke up late - real luxury ... and decided to go with Catherine to the Musee de la Marine. 

Located in a stunning building by the Trocadero, we had a view of the Tour Eiffel as we went by on the metro. The museum had a wonderful exhibit on Magellan's voyage, told through video and a graphic novel style, since there were very few artifacts from the trip. The multicultural crew was somewhat untrustworthy of each other and there was a mutiny and at least one execution en route to southeast Asia .At the time there were no maps past Buenos Aires, so after they crossed the Atlantic they were quickly in unknown territory. The connection they found, what became the Strait of Magellan, also included Ushuaia where we were earlier this year. Then on to what he named the Pacific Ocean where they sailed for 105 days without seeing land and with limited food. When they got to the Philippines, Magellan was killed by an indigenous chief, though it was almost a suicide as he was upset to find that the Mollucas, the spice islands which he trying to teach, were in the Portuguese sphere of control and not the Spanish, who has funded his trip, so he considered himself a failure. A fascinating story, and I did not know that he died em route. The rest of the museum was equally interesting, with amazing shop models, figureheads of enormous proportions, information on navigation, shipwrecks, and more.

We headed back to Catherine's to change for inner, and headed to Randlagh station (named after an Anglo-Irish noble, not sure why) to see Yurko and Marynka. We met Yurko and Marynka in Oakland, where they lived a couple doors down from us while Marynka was doing a postdoc at USF. Now she she is based in Paris, at the OECD working on anti-corruption investigations. her recent work led to some arrests in Ukraine of corrupt government officials. They now live near the Bois de Boulogne, so we took the metro there and Yurko met us at the metro. We walked to their apartment and got to meet their dog, Sir Charles who is very sweet. We had a nice dinner at Le Bois, and talked politics until the week hours, than back to Catherine's.