Busy Day

From yesterday morning until afternoon, we were locked in the apartment! This is what happened. We searched about the whole apartment for hours for the keys.  We have to use the keys to get OUT of the house, so basically, we were locked in. Imagine! Staying inside a house until 3 o'clock when Paris is waiting outside for you! (Then, in the afternoon, my Papa came home from work and said, "Oh, I'm terribly sorry!  I took both the keys with me!" He gave me a yummy yule log as a treat and kept apologizing to us.)

But before he came home, I felt puzzled.  I felt so sad because we were planning to go to the bakery and the Eiffel Tower. So after a while, we started to make ourselves a gingerbread house from a cottage kit because there was nothing else to do. It made us happy again. When the cottage kit was finished, this is what it looked like:

And did I tell you yet that one day this week, in Papa's sleep, in the middle of the night, Papa sang the beginning of a Wagner opera! It startled me awake, he was so loud. Then Mama and me started laughing our heads off.  And then Papa woke up and said, "Oh, I'm sorry!  I was singing in my sleep!" It makes me laugh so hard right now!

After we got the keys, we didn't go up the Eiffel Tower like we wanted to.  Unfortunately, the line was so long that it would probably take 45 minutes to get our tickets, which was crazy because there was about 151 people in the line. Instead, I got some hot chocloate and some cotton candy and we walked along some wonderful shops that were lit up for Christmas.  There were things like bubble blowers, some hats, hot chocolate, hot wine, rings, hats, and a lot more.

And today, we went to a different part of the city: the Louvre. Mainly, the best part you can see of it is the glass pyramid. (Maman is groaning at me now.)  The Louvre is so big, it would take two days to search the whole Louvre. We visited the Egyptian antiquities. After that, we fed the ducks and seabirds and pigeons in the Jardin des Tuilleries (a garden in front of the museum). Let me tell you, over one little crumb of food, they would try to poke each other's eyes out.  The amazing thing about those seabirds was that if you threw a crumb high in the air where they could see it, they could catch it in the air.

After, we walked through those shops again, but this time we were near the Champs Elysees. I got a type of food called a crepe (a thin pancake with chocolate and bananas wrapped up inside) and a hot chocolate.  Maman got vin chaud (hot wine). And here's the coolest part: we saw Pere Noel (Santa Claus) and some reindeer, including Rudolph.  They were up high in air in a sleigh hanging from a motorized cable tied to a really long line.  Of course, this Santa wasn't a real Santa--he was just one of those guys with a beard. He was talking a lot in French, so I couldn't understand him, but I think he said, "Merry Christmas" and to be good boys and girls.

That was pretty much all.  This day was pretty busy for us because we walked for miles to get through all those shops. Our feet were killing us.

Tomorrow, I'm going to sleep in. 

French word of the day: chocolat chaud (shock-oh-lah show), which means hot chocolate

French Fact of the Day: The Louvre isn't just a museum with a glass pyramid.  It used to be a castle, and the original stones of the castle are in the basement floor of the museum.