Bienvenue a Paris

We made it to Paris. It's raining outside, and we had to wait for a long while at the train station to get our Metro passes, but we made it to our hotel. It has a proper bed, so I'm looking forward to a luxurious night of sleep tonight. For now though, we're off to explore.

Au revoir

Wow are we tired. We had a really good first day in Paris. We ended up walking around a ton. We did an abbreviated version of Rick Steves's historic city walking tour. We saw Notre Dame for the first time. It looks pretty great. We will go back to go inside and report back. We also walked around many other famous sites.

About half of everything here used to be a palace, or so it seems. You always find yourself in the middle of a giant courtyard surrounded by a huge building and realize that even though you're in a museum or a shopping mall that some King at some point had this built for himself. It's pretty surreal.

I have tried my best to use some French when talking to people today. We stopped in at a few cafes today, and I initiated conversation in French. These places were very busy, and apparently I identified myself as hopeless enough that the waiter brought us English menus and spoke to us in English. I am perfectly willing to carry on and make a fool of myself trying to speak French, but it seems it is more efficient for them to work in English. From there it's a bit confusing, as I am willing to try to continue on in broken French, but the jig is up already. Do I continue en francais, or just accept defeat? The most important thing for me to is to make it very clear that I'm willing to give it a try. We will see how this situation progresses for the duration of our time here.

I promise we will get some pictures up soon.

A bientôt,

Sam