Tuesday, April 22

It is hard to believe that we only arrived yesterday!  Today we had beautiful weather and the day was packed with sites, metro, and sooooo much walking.  We surpassed 30,000 steps! Sore feet and legs for all!  

Most of us slept well in our bunk beds and went down for breakfast in the cafeteria.  Croissants, bread, Nutella, yogurt, jam, hot chocolate, tea, and coffee.  We felt much better than yesterday.  We took the metro to the Musée d'Orsay, which is the Impressionist art museum.  We visited Orsay this time because the Louvre is so crowded and overwhelmingly huge.  But also because Orsay has an amazing collection.  We were blown away seeing so many famous works in real life!!  Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Degas...  Room after room of paintings we have studied or have just seen many different times in our lives.  We were fortunate to have the early school group entry because it was quite busy by the time we left!  

We took the metro up to Montmartre, grabbed sandwiches, kebabs, pastries, etc. for another lunch on the run, and walked up a ton of stairs.  At the top we checked out the Place du Tertre and then the view of Paris from Sacre Coeur.  We walked down a ton of different stairs to the carousel in the square below, and then had some free time to explore the souvenir shops.  

The next metro ride took us to the Sainte Chapelle.  Good thing we had another school group reservation because the line, even for ticket holders, was insane!  This little chapel awed everyone with it's amazing stained glass room on the second floor.  From there we began the long walk to the Arc de Triomphe.  We stopped along the way to check out the pyramids at the Louvre, the obelisk at the place de la Concorde,  the jardin des Tuileries, and the Champs-Elysées boulevard.

Arriving at the Arc de Triomphe, we zipped past another long line with our school group reservation and climbed the 298 winding stairs to the top.  The view from above was beautiful!  From there we went back to the hostel for our dinner in the cafeteria.  We were quite happy with the choice of baked chicken, pasta, fries, veggies, cheese, bread, etc.  

We had a short rest of 30 minutes and then we stuffed our sore feet back in our shoes to go to Trocadéro across the river from the Eiffel tower.  Unfortunately for us, the 9:00 sparkle show didn't happen, probably because it was too light out still, so we had to wait an hour for the 10:00 light show.  But fortunately for us, no one seemed the least bit tired and we had plenty of entertainment as we waited with the crowd of Eiffel tower revelers.  Musicians, sing-a-longs, dancing, and endless Instagram photos were taken and TikToks were filmed.  

We joined the masses back to the metro, holding hands in our little groups so that no one would be lost.  We were like sardines in the train and when we finally got off at our stop, it felt great to be free!  We walked back to the hostel, set our meet-up time for the morning, and all went to our rooms for bed.  It is almost midnight, and I hope that there are no typos in this post :)  A demain!