Nous sommes arrivés!

We attempted to upload a little video showing our postage-stamp sized apartment, but we eventually realized that anything over a minute or so is going to be too large a file for Blogspot to handle. Ah well - we will try to get some captivating footage that is 1 minute or shorter and post it sometime soon!

In the meantime, here are a few pictures from our first day in Paris. We had a bit more eventful time getting here than we would have hoped - Northwest had thoughtfully booked us on an Amsterdam-Paris flight that was scheduled to take off only about 45 minutes after our Minneapolis-Amsterdam flight got in...and then our first flight was at least half an hour late taking off. Oh yeah, and the Northwest agent in Minneapolis who reassured us that we would not have to go through passport control in Amsterdam? He was wrong. We still did make the flight, boarding a few minutes before takeoff nice and flushed from our jog through the Amsterdam airport. Our luggage was not so lucky. KLM is supposed to be delivering it sometime today.

After getting the keys to our apartment and crashing for a few hours, we set out on what is sure to be the first of many very long walks around the city. (We're not sure how far, exactly, since none of our tourist maps seem to actually have a scale, but given how long we were walking, we think it must have been at least 8 miles.) We managed (surprisingly easily) to locate the little sandwich shop where Aaron ate many a piece of delectable flan when we were here in 2005 -- they are still doing business under the same name, but the flan is gone, sadly. We will be vigilantly on the lookout for new candidates for the coveted title of Best Flan Shop in Paris.

Day 1 pics: 1) Lunch at Father & Son sandwich shop; 2) An old creperie makes way for a Mexican restaurant; 3) Street flanked by Smart Cars parked on each corner; 4) Eiffel Tower at dusk.