Bon soir!!

We have successfully made it to France!

After a long travel day and adventurous hike through the city in search for our hotel, who needs cabs anyway, we have settled in to the city of lights.

The first night we decided to introduce ourselves to the city and see just how spectacular the lights truly are.

The second day, two of us spent the morning and early afternoon at the Louvre and then walked the Champs Élysées and the Seine in the afternoon. It is hard to say anything worth saying about the Louvre, but we both left the place with a desire to learn more about art to greater appreciate what we had seen. A highlight was seeing the foundations of the old castle that over the centuries morphed unto the Louvre that we see today. This part involved walking along a boardwalk constructed above what we think was the original moat. To make things even more interesting, while we were walking down in the depths of the museum rounding a corner more or less in the dark we heard a distressed female voice speaking in French. We came around the corner and the woman was being questioned by a guard while another Louvre guard searched for something under the boardwalk with his cell phone light. We have no idea what was going on but it made the journey to France in the Middle Ages feel pretty authentic. The rest of the Louvre was equally dramatic, but dramatic in an inspiring way.

Four hours later, we ascended through the glass pyramid to find a blustery, beautiful, dark-skied afternoon, which served to set a dramatic scene for the beige buildings and spring green horse chesnut trees that characterize the Paris cityscape. After a bit of wandering, we stopped to sit near a small reflecting pool at the Tuileries for some high quality people-watching. Steph and I got a kick out of watching the adorable French kids pushing around miniature sailboats. It was pretty obvious that their ancestors played a role in forming one of the greatest sea fleets of all time. So cute:)

In other news, tomorrow we're hoping to catch a Gregorian chant at Notre Dame and to wander the city in search of parks potentially making our way to Montmartre in north Paris.

We hope that you are all doing well!