Day One

You cannot pipe Python programs with head or tail without getting a nasty error. You can avoid this by requiring:

from signal import signal, SIGPIPE, SIG_DFL

signal(SIGPIPE, SIG_DFL)

You can make sublists with a nice range syntax:

INPUT = [1, 2, 3]

# get tail of list [2, 3]
INPUT[1:]

# get first two items [1, 2]
INPUT[0:2]

Day Two

tuples are quite nice for a simple data structure which you can destructure:

input = [("forward", 5), ("down", 5)]
for direction, amount in input:
    print(direction)