Days 2 & 3, Paris

Yesterday and today have been jampacked with tourist attractions and sight seeing which I might normally find irritating but mostly I am just glad to be able to see it and it's astounding to me how old everything is and how long ago it was built.
We started out with the Galleria and saw an exhibition on 2nd Empire dresses, Civil War era stuff that was absolutely beautiful and I got lots of inspiration for my cocktail dress. At the metro station afterwards we stopped at a hat stand. I bought a beret because the hat I had been knitting and finally finished did not cover my ears.
We traveled to the Louvre and saw the Sonia Rykiel exhibit. It was a collection of her work from the last 40 years stretched over two floors of the museum. The exhibits were interesting and showed a wide range of inspiration from all of the years. There were also videos of the runway shows from several years past.
Dana and Nina managed to get everyone lost again on the way to the restaurant Anael had suggested. They did not ask for help, which was fairly irritating since I am good with maps. I finally asked to see it and found the restaurant, which was a little patisserie with a good selection of sandwiches and things of that nature.
After lunch, I grabbed another map and plotted out some things to see and ended up practically leading a walking tour of Central Paris. We went back to the Louvre to see the Pyramids and the statue gardens, which were beautiful and fun to run around it. We stopped and took pictures at the obelisk and the small arch, and then we walked about half of the Champs Elysee (the gardens half, not the expensive half) before turning off to see the Grand Palace and the Petit Palace. They were huge, and beautiful. A lot of care and time went into We made it to the Eiffel Tower and took some cool photos before deciding we were frozen and would head back to the hostel.
On the way back to the hostel, we hopped into a little mini-grocery store and got a bottle of wine apiece as well as some brie and I also got apricots to have as a snack the next day. When we stopped for dinner, we ate at a pizza place next to the cafe that we had eaten at the night before. The waiter seemed to purposefully misunderstand that we wanted 2 pizzas to share between four people, and so when we ordered, he took away 2 of our silverware sets and 2 water glasses!
When we got to the hostel we drank our wine and played card games. Then some of the other girls wanted to go out and so we went back to the cafe across the street for a while.
Today we went to an accessories fair similar to the pret-a porter show on Friday. This one was mainly shoes and bags. They were much nicer and gave us some stickers and free shoelaces. Mine are purple and I am going to put them in my shiny gold shoes.
We headed to the Notre Dame after. Dana came with us for lunch and about to drove me crazy. She told us to take the bus instead of the free shuttle so we used up a ticket on the bus, but then we couldn't use it again on the metro. The first restaurant that we tried was nasty and also sold lotto tickets of some sort - cigarettes and sugar packets all over the floor! It looked like they never swept. The second one was cold and we still had trouble with the waiter but we managed to eat our omelets in relative peace.
We tried to find a cafe with hot drinks that was also warm and ended up at the Cafe Panis - near to the cathedral with lovely drinks. The waiter here was terrible - horribly snooty and snapped at Anna when she took a napkin for a souvenir.We took photos on the bridge of the Seine and went to the Cathedral. It was astoundingly beautiful and absolutely fantastic in person. We heard the organ play which was incredibly majestic and also a little creepy. There were lots of little chapels around the side of the main area all named after saints. We wandered around and I loved the stained glass windows.
Outside, tourists stopped me to ask for a photo. I picked up a watch with a face that is too large at one of the little souvenir shops. The metro took us to the Arc d'Triomphe. We played a game where whoever out of the four of us could pickpocket one of the others successfully would win a coffee and cookie of their choice. Anna won on Jeremy. She got a ticket out of his bookbag. We almost tried to run across the massive roundabout and kill ourselves, but Jeremy found the underground access. The underneath of the Arc is beautiful and there was a band from the military school nearby playing and it was wonderful. There were free tickets to climb the Arc and so we trekked the 284 steps to the top. The view was absolutely astounding - I could see for what seemed like miles. It was extremely cold and windy. We got a good photo as a group and headed back to the metro, where Anna received her prize.
We went back to the hostel and played a bunch of games. Lauren knows a ton of stuff to do. We played Up Chickens Down Chickens which you need a coin and a hard floor for, Murder in the Dark, and Kemps.