Wednesday 23rd November

DAY TWO! And what a tiring day it has been! Up at 6:30am and got back to the Chateau at 9:00pm- some VERY tired faces around (mine being one of them!) The coach journey into Paris and back was a long old affair today but we kept our spirits up through a combination of iPads, magazines, DVDs, telling jokes, finding interesting landmarks and spotting Parisian graffiti (it's a different class of graffiti in Paris you know!) The day itself was absolutely fantastic! Once in Paris, we travelled to the Seine where we took a boat journey along a length of the river with the Eiffel Tower in the background. We left there after about an hour and then moved onto eating our lunch about 300m away from the Tower itself. Our slot to go up the Tower was at 3pm, so we squeezed in a few 'touristy' photos (see if you can notice my contribution to this!) before heading up. Let me assure you that every child was in total awe of heading up to the top....some thought that when they got to the first stop that they had reached the top and were heading straight back down again (they had a surprise in store!). Everyone made it to the summit and we spent a good period of time walking around, taking in the amazing views, even if it was fairly foggy. When we came down, we took the children to buy some traditional French crepes (which they didn't take much persuading to do!) before heading back to the coach for our return journey. We were delayed a little bit coming back beacuse the fog slowed us down, so the children had a slightly later dinner than planned (the food is wonderful by the way) before heading straight to bed and once again they all fell asleep pronto again.

I have to mention something that made me laugh today. A young man, who shall remain nameless (but his name begins with a 'D' and ends in 'avey') was adamant he knew the French national anthem...so I asked him to hum it to me. All was going well until I realised he wasn't humming the national anthem but instead humming the theme song to Star Wars! Not sure when Chewbacca became a French national!?

Anyway, I am now needing to sleep myself, so here's hoping that our market visit and town tour tomorrow will go as well.

Bonne nuit

Monsieur Kelly