My First Visit to Paris

All of us on the train before we left. The man who is in charge of the program from the Versailles side is standing up in the middle.
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Our professors took us on a "walking tour" of Paris, which was basically a walk around the city to see as much as we could in 3 hours.  We got of the RER (the train from Versailles) and the first thing we saw was the Cathedral of Notre Dame.  They made us sketch it (of course), and there was a guy videotaping us sketching, and all these Asian people came up and took pictures of us, too.

We saw le Centre Pompidou, too, as well as Sainte-Chappelle, the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Musee D'Orsay, l'Ecole des Beaux Arts, la Place de la Concorde, and then we split up and went off on our own.  My group went and ate at a little cafe, and then we went and visited the Eiffel Tower before we left.

Paris!

The Seine
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Our structures professor took us to get ice cream (la glace), as well, at what is the best ice cream in Paris, apparently.  Regardless of whether or not it's the best, it was certainly delicious.  I got raspberry and rose flavored ice cream, and it actually tasted like roses.  I'm not quite sure how that's possible, but it did.

The craziest part is that I was actually THERE.  It wasn't a picture of the Eiffel Tower that was blown up real big and posted right in front of me--it was actually IT.  And when we got off the train and the first place we stopped was Notre Dame, it was almost like it couldn't really be THE Notre Dame de Paris.  It was too real.  It felt almost like it wasn't supposed to exist.

Me in front of Notre Dame
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Anyway, that was my first experience of Paris--I'm going to go many more times to see as much as I can before I go.  I'm sure I'll have better pictures and messages later on.