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Our European adventures have begun and our first stop is Paris. We arrived exhausted and confused from our 24 hour journey from the land of Thai. Not really knowing the day or the time we wanted nothing else than to drop our bags off somewhere, anywhere. It literally could have been anywhere and it would have been nicer than most of the places we had been in for the past few months...aahhh the western world. That first night we cruised down to the Eiffel tower and walked around the town to get a feel for it. The weather was overcast and much colder than Thailand...we were loving it. Paris is such a beautiful place. Although we expected a lot more people to speak english...

Our second day we did some shopping and headed down towards Champs' Elysees and the Arc de Triumph. We stopped to eat at the nicest Mc Donald's we have ever seen. It had leather seats and stations where you could listen to recently released CDs while you ate. "And you know what they call a, uh, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?" "They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese? "...They got the metric system, they wouldn't know what the f*** a Quarter Pounder is." "They call it a Royale with Cheese." "Thats right." Yeah it really exists, it isn't just a BS Tarantino quote. We spent the entire day on our feet so after we snapped some pics of the arc we hiked back and passed out since we weren't totally adjusted to the time change.

Before undertaking one of the world's most famous museums we checked out Notre Dame. The church was pretty impressive and it had some really crazy designs in ornate stained glass. Next stop, the behemoth building called the Louvre. Seeing only one wing of this place took us about 3 hours. We saw the Mona Lisa, along with what felt like every other person on the planet. We still had a whole lot more to see but we had to take a break before going in for round two. We finished up that night ending with the Venus De Milo, Code of Hammurabi and The Crown Jewels. The next day we were going to reserve spots on the train to Amsterdam and go see the palace that is the epitome of excess...Versailles. Two factors caused that plan to be delayed by a good 6 hours. First, we finally figured out why were kept seeing the French Military walking around with machine guns on the streets...the Rugby World Cup finals were taking place in Paris that day. This is the equivalent to the Superbowl everywhere else in the world, and England was in the finals. It seemed like the place was invaded by the British and the South Africans. The second thing was that the entire metro system in Paris decided that it was a great time to go on strike. They still ran trains but far less frequently than normal and no one really knew exactly what the schedule was. When you couple that with the fact that we don't speak french and aren't familiar with the rail system as it is, it made for a very frustrating experience. We got on the wrong trains, made circles around the city, waited in lines and bought tickets for things that should have been free. We finally booked our tickets and ended up making it out to Versailles. On the way we met a french girl who was living in Versaille and took us on a little guided tour of the palace. We walked up to Versailles and found out that since we were delayed so long, the inside was now closed and we would have to just check out the outside for now. We decided we are going to come back to Paris at the end of the trip because along with Versailles being closed, we didn't actually get to go up to the top of the Eiffel Tower. The palace is ridiculous though. They had gardens like Alice in Wonderland and marble statues dotted the landscape. You could just feel the ego. A bit deflated that our day's mission wasn't a total sucess, Justine took us to the store to get some good French wine, cheese, meat, baguettes and these things called gauffe (basically they are Belgium waffles that have been dipped in chocolate). We found a park bench overlooking Versailles to chill out on and eat our nutritious dinner. A little ridiulous, but hey...when in Rome...or Paris

We barely made our train to Amsterdam, THANKS TO THE RAILWAY WORKERS, and were off to see what all the hype is about.

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