Today we checked out of our hotel and went to the Irish embassy by metro. The Irish ambassador and his wife greeted us. In case we didn’t know he told us that Mayo had beaten Donegal yesterday. We were given a tour of the embassy by Meg Laffan, the cultural attaché. She is from Limerick. The rooms very big with very high ceilings. The carpets and rugs were made in Donegal. There were lots of old paintings and old-style furniture. There are four floors and twenty-two people working in the embassy. We were told all about the work of the embassy. In February, our president Michael D. Higgins was there and last November the Taoiseach visited. Today, the minister Róisín Shorthall was arriving for a meeting in the afternoon.

Afterwards, We just had enough time to visit the Louvre and see the Mona Lisa. There was a huge crowd of people taking photos and looking at the painting. The painting itself was quite small. The picture opposite was massive but not as many people were looking at that!

Then we went to Gare de l’Est to take the TGV to Strasbourg. It’s our first time on the TGV. We can see on the teacher’s laptop how fast the train is going. The fastest was 320km/h which is 200 miles per hour! We can see what the French countryside looks like. All the fields are very flat and there aren’t any stone walls! We saw a tractor ploughing a huge field. When we got to Strasbourg the French teachers met us at the station and took us to our accommodation.