Christmas already?

So this weekend has been pretty cool. We had our first out-of-town visitors! Megan's friends Katie and Steph came from Dublin and Oxford to visit Paris for the weekend, so we showed them around a bit. Friday we met them at the Eiffel Tower and then went out for lunch in the Latin Quarter, then showed them Notre Dame (where there was a mariachi band playing...oh, Paris). Then they had a walking tour scheduled, so Megan and I wandered around the Latin Quarter by ourselves. We saw the famous English bookstore Shakespeare and Company, and wandered around inside--it was pretty cool!! Stacks and stacks of English books. We did a little souvenir shopping, and checked out the Eglise Ste-Severin, and walked around the Latin Quarter a lot. Then we met up with Cristy and her mom to eat dinner, which was really cool!
Saturday we met Katie and Steph for lunch again, and then went to the Musee Rodin. It was really amazing--there are gardens and an indoor museum. Rodin was really talented at expressing emotion through really simple sculptures, or really complicated ones. We saw the Thinker and all of his other famous works. Then Megan and I went to les Arenes de Lutece, which is a 2000-year-old Roman arena that was used for gladiator fights back in the Gallo-Roman days. It was discovered 200 years ago and is now used for kids to play sports in, pretty much. Last on the agenda was the Jardin des Plantes, which is really pretty to walk around in--it also has the Paris Museum of Natural History, but neither of us were dying to see that so we skipped it this time around.
Today we went to lunch near Place de la Bastille, so we got to see that, and then went to the Marais to see the Musee Cognacq-Jay. It's basically a museum in one of the private mansions in the Marais that houses furniture, paintings, jewelery, etc, to show off upper-class French tastes from the 18th and 19th centuries. It was nothing too intriguing but still really pretty. Now we're back at home and settling down to do some homework before dinner with our host parents.
The family is arriving on Saturday so that should be cool!! Megan and I also just booked a hostel for our trip to Rome Thanksgiving weekend, which is walking distance from the Colosseum! We're also starting to plan our trip to London the weekend before that. November should be a pretty cool month!!
Oh, and if you thought Americans got Christmas decorations out early...Parisian grocery stores already have Advent calendars and Christmas chocolates ready for sale! When Megan and I were eating lunch today, the restaurant had a TV tuned to kids' morning cartoons, and it was a cartoon all about Santa...scary, hmmm? I guess when you don't have Halloween or Thanksgiving it's easy to slide straight to Christmas!
I just finished uploading all the pictures from this weekend, so check them out!