The Louvre and Arc de Triumph

Our second day was much more "productive" as we decided to check out some famous Paris sites. We started our journey with walking down to the Louvre, which is so big and beautiful. There is so much to do in the area between the museum and the garden, it's no wonder it's so busy. We started with waiting in line a bit to enter the building, and it was pretty cool going into the "pyramid". Of course our main goal was to see the Mona Lisa but we did take our time and see some other pieces of art first. You could spend hours and hours inside if you really loved art, and my family and I aren't exactly "art lovers" but still spent a few hours inside. It really is a beautiful museum and very very big! We found the Mona Lisa and the painting was pretty and there were a lot of people waiting to see her.

After the Louvre, we walked through the Tuliere garden. The grass is so green (because you can't walk on it) and there are fountains with lawn chairs where you can sit and enjoy the view. You can walk from the Louvre, through the garden to reach the Arc, but not without walking on the Champs Elysee. This street had some incredible shopping (great for my sister, not so great for myself on a backpacker budget) and was so beautiful. I really can't believe how beautiful all the buildings are everywhere you go. There were so many places to eat and shop, it was a wonderful walk.

At the Arc you can walk around a bit, but you cross under the street to get close to it. You could also pay to visit the top, but we decided to save our money since we would be getting incredible views from lots of other places anyway. The carvings and details were amazing, but the pictures really don't capture how big it is.

There are so many places to eat (over 17,000 listed on TripAdvisor!), so finding somewhere to eat was no problem. It felt like a lot places served more Italian style food, which I'm okay with, although trying new food is always exciting.

After dinner we went to a place my sister has been talking about since she left Paris almost 4 years ago - Laduree, which is a macaron shop. We had to buy some, and even at 2 euro each, they were pretty delicious. I had 1 lemon and 1 raspberry, although they had tones of flavours such as mint, lavender, licorice, black currant and as salted caramel.

As we did a lot of walking (17 km!), we decided to try out the metro. Coming from a small city, metros are still pretty new to me. Although after navigating the Beijing metro I think the Paris one felt like a piece of cake! We made it back to the apartment, ready to get some sleep to prepare for another busy day!Read more