Paris!

(Oct 23-25

Bonjour! We made it to Paris and stayed at a little place called Hotel Tiquetonne, which was by far the sketchiest hotel we've stayed at yet--and it wasn't even really that sketchy.

Note: spending an extra 15 euro a night for a private bathroom is totally worth the money. (Especially when the public bathroom requires "shower tokens.")

Anyway, we were were on the 7th floor and although that turned out to be a few stories too high for the free wireless internet to work, we did have a view of the Eiffel Tower. Here I am looking at it. The top of the tower is the little speck in the distance. At night, it has a search light that we know was looking for us. ("Katie and Aaron, why haven't you visited me yet? I'm right here! Where are you?")

Also, the E-Z Cheese is still with us. I'm sure every airport bag-scanner person is wondering what is wrong with these Americans:

Aaron even let me hold it for a little bit!

After we got settled, we stopped at a cafe called La Penderie for wine and a charcuterie and cheese plate. This made me very happy and was by far my favorite meal in Paris. My only regret is that Aaron wouldn't let me keep eating cheese for every meal and would use words like "nutrition," "health," and phrases like, "you forgot your Lactaid." Sheesh. What a dictator. He was also happy with our snack.

Then we did what we normally do when we arrive in a city: we walk around it until our feet fall off and discover many of the sites on our own!

We literally stumbled upon the Louvre:

L'Ecole de Baux Arts (Did anyone else think that this no longer existed? Well it DOES!)

And L'Opera Garnier 

The next day, we realized we had only that day to do ALL of Paris. (I was having flashbacks to when I did Paris in a day with my dad when I was a teenager.) We were armed with our walking shoes (or flip flops) and chocolate-filled croissants. We were ready!

First, we went back to the Louvre. They have a system now for audio tours where you rent a Nintendo 3DS and the whole tour is in 3D. It's awesome!

We saw the Venus de Milo:

Victory of Samosthrace:

And the Mona Lisa (not the most flattering picture of yours truly, but I know pictures are more interesting with people in them!):

 Aaron and I were amazed at how many tourists would push to the front of a piece of art to take a photo, and then just run away. Very few people seemed interested in actually LOOKING at the work. It was all very strange. 

We had lunch at a place called "Le Drop" where we ate and drank our weights in pate and wine. We also had some sort of steak in a mustard cream sauce with potatoes au gratin. So delicious!

Then, we went to the Eiffel Tower, which was just beautiful and more ornate than we expected/remembered. We didn't go up, but we did hang around outside it for a good while. 

The Eiffel Tower was very romantic!

Next was Notre Dame:

That night was our first laundry night (Our clothes were so stretched out, they were falling off of us. Also, we were out of clean necessities.) and we were able to hang out at a little cafe and have wine, cheese, and meat while playing cribbage while we waited. The place was called "Boi Boi" and I highly recommend it. 

All in all, we needed more time in Paris. It's a fabulous city with so much going on! However, we have places to be (like Barcelona)!

Amsterdam

Amsterdam (Oct 21-23)

We skipped out on a hotel for the evening of Oct 20th and took the midnight train going an-y-where!  Or to Amsterdam, whichever.  What I'm trying to say is we got a sleeper train between Munich and Amsterdam, which was fun.  And tiny.

I found out that my tripod shoe can open a bottle, always good to know.

And we played a bit of Cribbage while winding down for the evening (thanks, Tim and Tina!).

So we get into Amsterdam nice and early, drop our bags off at the hotel and go wandering around.  Obligatory Amsterdam-is-awesome-look-at-these-freaking-canals picture.

We start heading to the VanGogh Museum and have our first kitten sighting in Amsterdam.

The text reads literally, "Caution Courageous Cat" and is approximately equivalent to the "Beware of Dog" signs you might see on someone's fence.  I love this town already.

We made it to the Van Gogh Museum (which is currently closed for construction.  We're sensing a theme) but the exhibits had been moved to the Hermitage.  We were cold and hungry, so we stopped in to the Stedelijk Museum's Restaurant (next door) for lunch, where we tried our first round of french fries and mayonnaise.  It was actually pretty good.  Unfortunately, we did not go to a McDonald's, and so were unable to order a Royale with Cheese or a beer.  I suppose that'll give us something to look forward to next time.

We walked over to the Hermitage and saw the Van Gogh exhibit (as well as a bit of their permanent Impressionists exhibit) and took a minute to relax before heading to the hotel to check in.

So the hotel isn't really a hotel in the conventional sense.  It's basically a room in the back of a house.  The place is called B&B 1680 and is run by a really nice guy named Joost who was so stupidly accommodating that when we checked in, he was giving us the rundown of the room and was literally backing out of the room and was about to close the door when I asked him about settling up, to which he replied "If it's OK for you, it would be best upon arrival."  He wouldn't even say, "yeah, now is good."  Here's what the room looked like.

If you look, you can see some tile on the wall behind me.  Apparently it was a part of the original build and had been covered up.  When Joost remodeled the room to turn it into an apartment they found the tile and left it.  Just gorgeous.

It's also in a really great location.

I swear that I didn't plan that, but it was actually quite apt, as pot was in the air constantly.  We once walked down an alley between a canal and the back of a series of buildings for at least 100 yards where the smell was so strong, you'd have thought we were in a small room filled with lit bongs the entire way.  I'm not entirely sure I'll be able to pass a drug test when I get back just having been in the city.

We walked around some more and found out that many (if not most) people in Amsterdam don't bother with curtains, which made Katie very happy...

So we went wandering again and stumbled upon a pretty respectable carnival where you could travel to such exotic places as “New York USA” and a “Barber Shop”.  Clearly barber shops in Amsterdam are more interesting than those in the States.

That night we headed to a little hole in the wall that Katie found called De Zotte which had an excellent beer list and very good food.  I tried a couple of Trappists called Orval and Achel, both of which turned out to be good ideas.

The next day we took to wandering yet again, this time making our way to the Noorderkerk Market in Jordan, which had mostly clothing and home goods.

Then we headed to the Anne Frank House.  It's kind of odd to wander through there having never had any contact with that story outside of reading the Diary, you keep looking at the rooms thinking, "this isn't nearly as small as I thought it would be, this would be a decent-size bedroom," before realizing that she shared the room with a family friend.  Then you look at the kitchen and say, "this is a decent-size kitchen, "until you realize that it was also a bedroom for a married couple.  Then you walk into the next room and think, "this is a decent-size apartment for Amsterdam", and then you realize that they could never leave, and then the entire place starts to feel incredibly small, in the most literal form of the word "incredible".

As with the Van Gogh museum, no photos were allowed, but here is the building itself, a warehouse and front office for a company that sold jams/preserves in the mid 1900's.

You are reasonably sad right now, so here's a happy picture to cheer you up!

So we kept seeing things about pancakes, apparently they're kind of an Amsterdam tradition.  So we dropped in to a diner called "Sarah's Pancake House" for apple and cheese pancakes and a spiked cider.  The pancake (singular) was about as thick as a crepe but much larger.  Katie was pleased.

Afterwards we went looking for a place to ship some stuff home (unsuccessfully... well, ish).  We did, however, stumble across a brewpub with a homemade ale.

Katie's reaction...

OK, so she wasn't a huge fan, but THERE WAS A FIGARO KITTEN OUTSIDE (orange tabby with stripes)!  Between the beer and the cat, I considered it a diamond in the rough.

That night we went to an Indonesian restaurant called Bojo that turned out to be quite good.  We had lumpia and bapau to start dinner, and ayam roedjak (chicken in curry sauce over rice with prawn chips.  Nom.) for the main.  Apparently centuries of imperialism pays off in the form of excellent restaurants hundreds of years later.  Delicious.  Unfortunately, not all of their food preferences are so discerning.  For example, here is a restaurant that serves only fries in containers of various sizes and with various types of toppings/dipping sauces.

On the way home, we saw yet another cat.  Awesome!  I love this town.

The next day we went walking and Katie got me an early birthday present (more on that later).  We also found yet another cat wandering around downtown Amsterdam.  BEST.  CITY.  EVER.

We caught a train to Paris late morning/early afternoon from the awesome Amsterdam Central Station.

Munich, Germany

Munich (Oct 17-20)

The next stop on our Honeymoon journey was Munich.

We stayed at the Stachus Hotel, which was only a block away from Neuhauser Strassen (The street with all the stuff on it, as I liked to call it.) This hotel was also nice, but came with a faulty headboard that was simply a block of wood they drilled into the floor, which we immediately broke by looking at it. Aaron is happy the EZ Cheese made it this far with us as well. 

After unpacking, we headed down Neuhauser and saw the Dom (which should really be called the Doms because there are two of them) and Marienplatz, where the infamous Glockenspeil (a giant coo-coo clock with little dudes instead of a bird) is located. Both these areas were undergoing construction—a theme we found in the city. We suspect that as soon as Octoberfest ended the week before, the city immediately started to repair the damage. 

At this point, we realized that we were both hungry and in Germany and headed into the first Brauhaus we could find for beer and sausages.  The rest of the night repeated this pattern.

Weisses Brauhaus gave us sausages! Also, we learned that those pretzels they give you are not free—they charge you by how many you eat! (Good to know as it turned out Aaron  had a serious pretzel and mustard problem.)

Haufbrauhaus was more touristy but we had to go back because it’s what you do when you are tourists. Aaron drank two beers at once!

And then he ate an entire plate of schnitzel and potatoes with much enthusiasm!

The next day, we woke up with just enough time to watch the Glockenspeil do it’s dancy thing and it was so lame, I’m going to show you this picture of the two of us in front of it at night instead:

We then went to the Deutches Museum, which is basically a technology museum (also, under construction) and this made Aaron very happy! Look at him! He’s next to a metal thingie of some sort!

We also found a fun thermal heat thing where we learned my nose gives off less heat then my insulated jacket.

We also wandered around the English Garden for a bit.

That night, we went to dinner at a place called Opatija on Tal where we had our first currywurst! Currywurst is veal sausage in a tomato-curry-sweet and sour sauce and comes with fries. Very yummy! Aaron’s sausage had cheese IN it. We decided that we like the way these Germans think.

The next day we went to Schloss Neuschwanstein aka the castle that inspired Sleeping Beauty’s castle in Disney World. We found a guided tour in English and had a very eccentric guide who wore two hats on his head, two scarves (one around his neck and the other around his waist, naturally) and carried his umbrella like a rifle.

We ate sausages.

And saw the castle from a bridge.

And then again up close.

And then our guide decided to not take us to Fuessen as promised and instead put us on a bus back to Munich so he could go home early. We took this in stride and had more beer.

The next day, we left late at night, so we spent the day at the Residence Museum. Pretty amazing German Rococo design, I must say. 

And that's pretty much it! Next stop: Amsterdam!