The Journey to Paris

We started our last half day in Amsterdam by getting some breakfast at a cafe. The cafe served really good coffee but the breakfast itself was more interesting. We ordered ham, cheese, and eggs expecting an omelet. What we got was a scoop of scrambled eggs with cold cut style ham and cheese. Granted, the ham and cheese was very good but it was quite different. We headed back to our hotel and grabbed our bags. Em was extremely happy that we got a taxi to pick us up rather than walking to the train station. I'll reluctantly agree with her that it was much easier.

The train ride to Paris was just over three hours, but very simple and really comfortable. It was a high speed train and I was surprised by how quiet it was from the inside. Em and I spent the time watching "Dexter" on our laptop and looking out the window at the Belgian and French country side. I grabbed this video of the view:

Once we arrived in Paris we took a short taxi ride to our hotel, which is quite nice. It is located in the 5th arrondisement (district), in the Latin Quarter. This section of Paris houses a lot of the college students. We were able to upgrade our room to a junior suite for only a few extra dollars per night, which is great because our original room was barely big enough for the two of us plus our bags! After getting settled, we headed out into a gray and rainy Paris (for those of you keeping track, yes, it has been rainy and gloomy everyday so far). We walked around just catching the sites for a bit before heading to dinner:

At dinner, I got ox that was served on a shish-kabob and Em ordered some Lamb. It was good but not the excellent French culinary experience that you hear so much about. We then headed to a bar to grab a few drinks. We found this place that seemed to be Canadian themed, actually. The TV’s were showing a cricket match and tennis. There were many college kids there enjoying wing night. However, at ½ a Euro per wing, coming from Watertown where there is 10 cent win night, I didn't think that it was a very good deal. After enjoying 1 or 2 “1664”s (the name of the beer), Em and I called it a night and meandered back to the hotel.

I’ll end this blog with some random thoughts about impressions of Amsterdam, Paris, and Europe in general.

1. In Amsterdam, if you mess up parallel parking you can fall into a canal. I meant to take a picture of how close the cars park to the canal (no guardrails), but I forgot…

2. The cyclists in Amsterdam are crazy. They are everywhere, and if you get in their bike path they will end you. Seriously – they’re nuts and none of them wear helmets. I think their brazenness is kind of interesting, because I’m pretty sure if you hit a dude on a bicycle both parties involved are in for an unpleasant experience. It’s like the Dutch are a nation of kamikazes.

3. Portion sizes aren’t really all that different than what you get in America, with two exceptions – coffee and ice cream are both much smaller. Actually, in Amsterdam portion sizes were very large. Probably because it is so touristy.

4. In public bathrooms, they don’t have paper towels to use to dry your hands. Instead, they have this weird towel wheel that you pull and it gets reused a million times. I can’t explain it well – it’s very strange. Google it. It’s weird and somewhat gross.

5. The toilets here all have two flush options – little flush and mega flush. Emmy always has to use the mega flush.

6. Everyone in Amsterdam speaks very good English and is very nice. Most people in Paris seem to speak some English, but you can tell they dislike speaking it. That being said, the stereotype of the French being very rude is not true.

7. The internet connection at our hotel in Paris is very shaky, so it will be harder to blog and call home via Skype.

Finally, I thought I’d document how technologically wired we are in our travels through Europe. If you thought I was going off the grid for a month, y’all crazy. We have:

1 Dell Laptop

2 iPhones, each with a 100mb international data plan

1 Digital SLR camera

1 Regular Digital Camera

1 Flip HD Video Camera

2 Amazon Kindle reading devices

2 Universal power adapters

1 Set of portable mini-speakers

1 Nintendo DS portable game system with 3 games

All sorts of wires and charges.

It is 1:00 AM here and we already had our first full day in Paris, but I’ll blog about that tomorrow.