Emily's Blog

 We have been in Paris for a week but tonight we are catching an overnight train to Venice. It’s pretty sad leaving Paris and our apartment, but I’m excited to be going to Venice.

Our apartment was opposite Sorbonne University in the 5th arrondissement in the Latin Quarter on the Left Bank. An arrondissement is like a suburb and the left bank means it’s on the left side of the Seine River that runs through the middle of Paris. We were staying very close to the Pantheon and the Luxembourg Gardens.

Nearly every day we walked past Notre Dame Cathedral. Notre Dame is on the island in the centre of the Seine and if you are on the highway in France and it says Paris is 160 km away, it means you are 160km from Notre Dame.

The Louvre is a very big museum and the main courtyard has only three sides. There is a big glass pyramid that you can go onto to get into the museum. In front of the Louvre there is the Tuilieries Gardens, it has lots and lots of statues but we only got to walk through half of it because it was muddy. The mud was the same light colouring as their buildings because it was crushed limestone instead of dirt.

On the other side of the Tuilieries Gardens is the Place de la Concorde, it has a big Egyptian obelisk covered in heiroglyphics that’s about 4000 years old. We walked from the Place de la Concorde up the Champs-Elysee and looked through the Christmas markets so we could go to the Arc de Triomphe.

We went under the road in a tunnel to get to the Arc de Triomphe because the Arc de Triomphe is a roundabout. We climbed up a spiral staircase to get up to the top.

I have a cousin called Paris and I hope she can go to Paris one day too.