The Global Guy

It’s a day for cliched post titles. 

I think Paris may have been my favorite place that we visited during this trip.  Everything was amazing, from the food, to the wine, the art and even the people.  We’d expected to be treated rudely, but thankfully this stereotype proved to be quite false.  We arrived on the afternoon train from Amsterdam, and immediately got lost trying to find our hostel.  Luckily a smartly dressed elderly lady walking her dog was able to help us, with her speaking bad English, and Syd speaking bad French.   We’d arrived on a Sunday, and quickly realized that after 7pm it was going to be tough to find a place to eat.  Luckily we found a little bistro that didn’t mind staying open a little longer, and had one of the best first meals I’ve ever had in a country. 

The next day we started out doing the typical tourist stuff…the Louve, the Eiffel tower, Notre Dame the riverwalk.  Once again, nighttime proved to be when Paris was at its best, as we bar hopped from place to place snacking and drinking excellent French wine.

The next day I wanted to go explore the catacombs.  Paris is literally built upon the bones if its former citizens.  There are tours where you can be guided underneath the city and see the tunnels and final resting places of people long gone.  Some of the bones are stacked neatly, and others are arranged in decorative piles.  Finally we ended up going to the cemetary Père Lachaise and walked around looking for graves of famous people.  The most interesting was Jim Morrison’s, just because it was the only one that has a permanent police officer there to keep people from vandalizing the place. 

The next day we got up early, and caught a quick flight back to London and then onto home. 

Well, this town is nothing like what I expected!  We got into our hostel from the airport pretty late, but we wanted to go out and see a bit of the nightlife.  We were staying in the Leidseplein area, and there were tons of bars open at taht time of the night.  We were impressed with how friendly the locals were, and how well everyone spoke English.  We met a few people that were doing after work happy hours, and ended up talking till late in the evening.  The next day we wandered around looking at all the sights, including the sex museum, and basically waiting for night time.  Once it got dark it was time to have some fun Amsterdam style.  We headed to the red-light district, and wandered around checking out the wares in the windows, and finally decided to go see one of the live shows.  Very interesting….  Later on we decided to go check out one of the infamous coffee shops.  I’d never had coffee that made me that hungry before…lots of fun!

We slept late, and then the next day headed to the train station to head over to Paris.

This was my first trip out of North America.  I’d just heard about a great fair on US Airways between DFW and London, and decided that I couldn’t miss out.  I asked around my circle of friends to see if anyone wanted to go, but it was very last minute, and most people already had plans for Thanksgiving.  Thru one of these friends though, I met Syd and she decided to go with me.  We had a blast, and she eventually ended up being one of the four roommates in the Austin Party House days.  We knew it was going to be a rushed trip; looking back, we crammed way too much into a week, but we did get to see the major highlights of London, Paris and Amsterdam. 

We arrived at Heathrow on two different flights, very early in the morning.  We had reservations at a hostel, and headed over there to drop off our bags and start looking around.  We set ourselves up on one of those open bus tours of the city, and then wandered over to the main area to see the typical tourist sites.  Later we took a river cruise on the Thames, and then caught a showing of Les Miserables on the west end that night.  The next day we caught the changing of the guard and went shopping at Harrod’s and other neat little shops.

Finally we headed to the airport to catch our flight to Amsterdam.  The check-in counter had a sign that was asking for volunteers to be bumped.  We figured we didn’t have anything to lose, so we let them know we didn’t mind. It turned out that we weren’t needed, but to thank us, they gave us complimentary upgrades to first class.  It was only about an hour flight, but we discovered that you can drink a LOT of champagne in an hour.