Europe 2007

Paris, city of love, weird non-qwerty keyboards and crepes.

Six-and-a-bit days in Paris later, and it feels like yesterday that we arrived. Paris is the first truly magnificent, huge, cosmopolitan city we have visited on this tour, and at times was simply overwhelming.

Where to begin? Our hotel in Montmatre was wonderful, run by a polite (if not always friendly in the australian sense of the word...), english-speaking (thank god) family. Our room was on the fourth floor and overlooked the typical montmatre street, rue burq, with two bars, a laverie, and a great deal of parked scooters.

Paris has more than it's fair share of amazing landmarks and attractions. (in fact, it seems to have stolen all of London's as well). The best of those that we visited, in no particular order:
- The Eiffel tower, first by day, then night (on the same day, it was a long line), then during a wild thunderstorm. The thunderstorm contributed to our lift to the first floor not working for some time, and stranding many in the rain (not us though, comfortably under cover), and a spectacular light show across the city once we reached the top. Truly memorable.

- The Louvre, or Napoleon's Trophy Room. We spent around six hours in there, and still only saw about a third of the collection. Definitely the biggest collection of Gaudy Italian Biblical Art in the world... The Louvre highlights included: The Egyptian and Roman antiquities, Vermeer's Astronomer and Lacemaker, a nice little collection of Rembrandts, the crowd around the Mona Lisa (and the painting itself, I guess, although hard to see what all the fuss is about)
- The Arc D'Triomph, particularly the view of the world's first roundabout below. The craziest thing involving traffic. Anywhere. Ever.

So, you can probably guess, we enjoyed Paris immensely. And we'll go back, the sooner the better.

Our metro stop

Notre Dame

Musee d'Orsay

Montmatre Carousel - from Amelie

Now, as promised in the subtitle, Amsterdam Highlights...

- The Flying Pig, our hostel. A brilliant little hostel next to the Vondelpark, right off the best strip of Amsterdam - Leidseplein/Leidestraat. The Pig had a great little bar down stairs, which we spent every evening at, with cheap hoegaarden, jaagermeister, a ginger cat, and a generous kiwi bartender. They also served junk food for breakfast.
- Jonny Depp (sic), our bicycle for a day. Jonny took us around Amsterdam, dutch style. We loved Jonny, and Jonny didn't throw us off, not even when we rode him through a typhoon.

Jonny Depp

- Coffeeshops...
- Van Gogh Museum. An amazing collection of the most interesting artist about (in our opinion).
- The Ann Franke Huis. A really great tour through the house Ann Franke and her family hid in during world war II. Very insightful.

It's now early evening on a very warm, very sunny afternoon in Venice. It's a lovely place, and the perfect opportunity for us to recharge our batteries after setting a pretty relentless pace the last few weeks.

Until the next post,

Ciao Bella!

We arrived in Paris yesterday afternoon after a leisurely ride on the train through the Belgian countryside. Paris is a welcome change of pace from the relentless, hedonistic debauchery of Amsterdam.

We are staying in a lovely, quaint hotel - Hotel Bonsejour on the slopes of Montmatre.

We're out of time now, as the internet in Paris is expensive, but a full update is coming soon.