Ali – We arrived in Paris after 2.5 hours on a high speed train from Colmar. For those who love stats, our top speed clocked in at 314 km/hour, which is somewhere north of 190 miles per hour. According to Wikipedia, the US, which was the first country to get high speed rail, is now lame.
The switch from German to French has been interesting. My high school French continues to trickle to the surface of my brain, with translations of signs and phrases coming out of the blue like I’m a psychic channeling the ghost of a Rick Steves’ French phrase book. Joe on the other hand is suddenly completely language incapable; he learned Bon soir on our first evening and then proceeded to use it the next morning, until I broke it to him that he was wishing everyone a good evening at 10 am. It’s given him new found sympathy for Maya getting plopped in the middle of a foreign country with no language skills.
We have been staying at an airBnB on the edge of the Jardin du Luxenbourg, which is pretty ideal for seeing the sights. We got the place fairly cheaply because of the totally spooky 4 story walk-up that’s under renovation. . 
Knowing we were only here for 2 full days, I made the smart move to just book us some tours. Paris is overwhelming and filled with tourists so trying to figure out what to see and then standing in a line to see it seemed less fun than getting kicked in the shin. So Monday morning I booked us on a chocolate and pastry tasting tour. This was my first ever food tasting tour and it could have been lame. But Maya was way on board with tasting chocolate and a blind Parisian could manage to find chocolate and pastries for us to taste in Paris so seemed like a safe bet. Well I’m happy to report it was a complete success. We had a young French professional sommelier and self-professed food junkie as a tour guide- she runs a one woman tour company that I found on Get Your Guide. Lots of fun history about French food (e.g. Did you know the croissant is crescent shape because it celebrates the defeat of an Islamic horde of some sort by some group of Europeans?? – legends vary so details are a bit murky) and lots of great tasting. Another couple with us from Oklahoma said they always do food tours whenever they go anywhere because it’s such a great way to get to know the place and history. 
Maya proclaimed, ‘best tour ever!’ so we chalked that up as a win.
Monday evening we headed to our Fat Tire night ride through Paris. Fat Tire tours get pretty good reviews in general as a kid friendly activity and great way to see a city. This was a 4 hour tour starting at 6:30pm and Maya was understandably concerned about the level of difficulty of the bike riding. I can now report the pace is quite leisurely but the Paris street riding at night is a bit of an exhilarating adrenaline rush. Now I don’t mean to say it compares in any way to putting on a wingsuit and jumping off a mountain. But one does feel a bit more alive in the middle of Paris putting out a policemen stop hand to an oncoming bus as the tour guide yells insults in French at a taxi driver blocking the road. Maya navigated all this at Defcon 5 alert, hurtling a steady stream of panicked acusations of parental incompetence at us but was like the young zebra in the pack and thus actually quite protected. Plus doing Paris at night is really the best way to see it. Nothing can compare to careening around the plaza of the Louvre with all of that monstrosity lit up or riding triumphantly through the Arc de Triomph. All my pictures are dark and crappy but trust me, it was awesome.
Tuesday morning we headed to the catecombs. I had purchased the ‘skip the line’ tickets with included audio guide. Now this is one solid piece of advice for Paris: if there is something you really want to see, pay the extra and book a skip the line tour or pass. We arrived to a line wrapped around the block. The directions were to head to a neighboring tobacco shop and pick up our tickets, which seemed a bit scamish and shady but ended up working out as we were ushered in past the line upon our return with tickets in hand. I tried not to look at the pist-off faces. We got our audio guides and headed down to what is the largest ossuarium (a.k.a charnel house) in the world.
The brief history goes like this: the catecombs started out as limestone quarries to build all the huge building in Paris. But they built the huge buildings on top of the land that they were hollowing out. Land begins to sink into hollow ground. King takes note. King orders repairs. Meanwhile dead start pilling up in the city. Someone has the bright idea to put all the dead in the now structurally sound catecombs and make morbid art out of the bones. Millions flock to see morbid art under Paris. 
I have a soft spot for morbid stuff so I really enjoyed trying to read all the death poetry in French, which definitely went better than reading it in Latin. Joe played forensic pathologist, trying to deduce whether large skull holes were pre or post mortem and show Maya what the inside of an eye socket looks like.
Now lest you think that all our adventures are wild successes due to my detailed planning skills, I should note that our last trek of the day to watch sunset from the Eiffel tower was a total bust. It did re-enforce my previously stated conviction that anything you really want to see in Paris, pre book and pay for line skipping. We went on a lark and found the stairs closed (which was our rough plan for avoiding the line), the elevator to the top closed and a long line to get to the elevator that goes to the second floor. This was after waiting in line for the security strip search just to get near the tower. So we ate quiche in the freezing park and went home.
Tomorrow off to Dublin. I hope we didn’t need to prebook our Guinness drinking.