"Do you KNOW what the Louvre IS?"

Today was our first full day in Paris, and it was full of food, adventure and fun.
We slept in until ten so Maddie could try and fight off her jet lag, but once we were all awake we got ready and walked down our street deciding what we wanted for brunch. We ended up doing some grocery shopping and then we got baguettes and pain au chocolat from a patisserie. Once we had finished eating our delicious pastries, we spent the day walking around sightseeing. We decided to walk to the Eiffel Tower and see what we would run into on the way. Because I didn't pay a lot of attention in French class, I didn't know a lot about the buildings and statues we saw. If a building or statue looked pretty or important, I took a picture..

There are carousels scattered throughout Paris, but the first one we saw was here by the ice rink.

While we were walking we walked into some interesting little shops, and even found Harry Potter in french (surprise..)

After exploring for awhile we ended up at the Louvre. I had a rather embarrassing moment, not knowing what the Louvre looked like. oops.

As we kept walking, there was an incident in which two men kind of...I guess you could say 'legally mugged' us. As was taking the above picture, one of the guys went up to Matt and told him to hold some string for him. Matt said no, but the guy went up to him anyways and grabbed his wrist. He then proceeded to make a bracelet, tie it around his wrist and then told him to give him ten euros. Maddie and I walked over, and another guy did the same thing to us, except the entire time he was saying, "you are sexy. Do you have boyfriend?" and some other things he clearly memorized from a phrase book. Because "we were sexy" he only made us give him eight euro each. So that was a rather exciting experience.
We just kept walking after that, complaining--but the same thing happened later, and Maddie screamed no and we kept walking. We also had some gypsies ask us if we spoke english, but we said no...Maddie and I were rather excited when we found the fountain from The Devil Wears Prada (which we are watching right now).

Before we walked to the Eiffel Tower we decided to walk to the Arc de Triomphe. It was so much bigger than I expected it to be! We walked through the tunnel and went inside it to take some pictures and be tourists.

We then walked to the Eiffel Tower, which was inspiring and magnifique. Maddie and I bought some delicious crepes and ate them in front of the Eiffel Tower. They were pretty messy, but delicious! We both had banana and chocolate crepes, with a lot of whipped creme and nutella...it was kind of messy to eat, but so worth it! We then took lots and lots of pictures of the Eiffel Tower. The line was very long today so we didn't go inside, but we will be going back in the next few days to go up it.

It started to get cold after walking for awhile, so we decided to walk down the river seine to get back to our flat. It was picturesque, and we saw all of the monuments we saw this morning, except it had gotten quite dark outside so everything was lit up and beautiful. For dinner we bought a fresh baguette and got some brie cheese, and I had some leftover pasta from dinner last night. So far one of my favorite things about Paris is the food. After dinner we walked around for awhile and went window shopping until everything began to close. Thankfully, things don't close here as early as Edinburgh. There is also so much more to do at night here. We are hopefully going to be taking a night cruise while we are here...and of course New Years Eve!!
Tomorrow the plan is to go to Notre Dame and maybe take a bus tour...and shopping =]