Prescription for Travel Bug Bite?

The travel bug has struck again! I am headed to Los Angeles in September, and maybe, just maybe *fingers crossed* to Peru in October, so traveling has been on the brain recently. I did quite a bit of Los Angeles research today, as Becca posted an awesome list of things that we might be doing that weekend, and it just makes me want to go out and see a million things that I have never seen or done before.

I blame my jet set family! In the good way of course. My mom and I hit Chile when I was in the 7th grade (South America seems to be the locale for mother/daughter trips) but our first international vacay as a family wasn't until the summer before my freshman year of high school to the land of Deutschland. My parents lived there for a few years while my dad still worked for IBM and wanted to take the whole clan back to relive the memories.

We stayed with their friends for a few days when we first got there, friends that had three daughters. Its rather obnoxious and makes you hate American schooling when the girl half your age knows more Latin than you do of German. She chose Latin before English, and I already barely got along with people younger than me, so let's just assume that those communications and relationships were very limited.

The trip was amazing though. We did Germany, Austria, and a brief jaunt into Lichtenstein over the three weeks we were there. I kept a journal on my palm pilot. Only to realize that when your palm pilot runs out of batteries, it loses all of the information on it. Yup, less than awesome. But I have moments that will always stick out in my head. Our time at the Wirths is pretty clear, as well as the Salt Mines in Austria.

My favorite by far was the Eagles Nest (Hitler's secret mountain top bunker, see above) It was gorgeous up there. We also saw Auschwitz, Neuschwanstein, Insbruck, and Munich.



While we were in Berlin, it was the same time as the Love Parade (move over Boston, Love Parade wins in the Gay Pride contest). We were in a shop buying a Love Parade shirt, as well as bright green shoelaces, when we were evacuated out of the back of the shop by the workers because of a bomb threat empty suitcase outside in the square. Crazy moment!

Abrupt end of post. Must resist urge to scratch travel bug bite better next time...

Last Paris post...I promise.

Last one I swear. And to keep you from throwing your computers at me, I will keep to one line captions of each photo.

The worst "salad" ever. Still have no idea what the white stuff is.

Dog food served for the EF Paris finale dinner. I refused to touch it.

Our lovely pals, Ryan and Kristan. I think we should go visit them.

Back the hotel, the cool kids club.

The bottle of wine that Tim drank all by himself.

Next day:
Super pissed at the airport. They wouldn't let us get in line. We BARELY made the flight.

Our anniversary gift to ourselves, an upgrade to leg room! Best money spent all trip!

Happy to be leaving Paris and eating my granola bar!

White Paris.

Our last full day in Paris started with a big white bang. It had snowed for a good portion of the night, and was still snowing by the time that we headed out for the day. Of course Kristan and Ryan, being from Cali, were thrilled with this precipitation situation.
After a mishap of going the wrong direction on the metro, we made it to the right stop and walked up the only hill in Paris to make it to the bottom of Sacre Cour. With the snow and steep stairs, we decided to take the Funicular up to the top.
We took a few pictures against the church and made the slow wander around until we came across the artist's district. Not many people, but on the outskirts was the Dali Museum, our first stop for the day. Tim is a huge Dali fan, so he was super looking forward to it, and even I, who is less interested in the artist, thought it was pretty cool. It was a lot bigger than I expected, and had a lot of his earlier works, which I found i liked a lot more than his older more famous pieces. But it was artwork, sculpture, displays, art in every single medium possible. Sadly, we found the gift shop closed. Boo.

We parted ways with Ryan and Kristan, went inside the Sacre Cour and checked out the area pretty quickly. By this point, the snow had made everything wet, so not only were we cold, we were slush filled! But Tim drug us to the Luxembourg Jardin, which had been on my list to see, just not if it was this cold.

Once out of the metro, we walked the wrong direction for quite some time, but finally made it to the park. It was HUGE. Way bigger than I had expected, its a famous park that has a ton of famous statues and sculptures spread throughout. My goal was to see the Medici Fountain. We trekked through the gardens, my sniffles worsening, and by the time we found, I was miserable. But the Fountain was pretty sweet, much larger than I had expected.
I had had it, being the huge brat that I am, as we exited the park and wandered around trying to make up our decision, I threw a Anti-Paris tempertantrum. I must say, it was some of my best work, despite the fact that Tim just laughed at me through the whole thing. I hated being cold, wet, and I hated everything French including the people, and i was hungry and all I wanted was to go to a restaurant where the waiter wouldn't be rude, I knew how to order, what i was ordering, and that it would be good. I wanted Paris without the Parisians!

We eventually came across a mall, and inside this mall was a little cafe thing, so we thought we would take a peek at the rest of the mall, and right across from the Gap.....an Irish Pub!!!! Yay. Menu in English, with Irish waitresses. And REALLY good food. It was the happiest meal! We even found nothing wrong with being charged literally (no exaggeration) 6 dollars a piece for a bottle of diet coke! Mmm...the price you pay for relaxation!
After our meal was when we caught up with Ryan and Kristan at the Lourve. For more on that "lovely" experience, check it out here: Not Loving the Lourve.

Not Loving the Lourve...

I have totally been procrastinating my last and final day in Paris, aka the last in a long series of trip posts. And I plan on continuing such procrastination since it was the longest day and most eventful day on the planet!

BUT. I will at least go into the afternoon. Well, part of it at least. It involves one location. The Lourve. The most overrated museum in the galaxy. Seriously. From earlier events in the day, by the time we got to the Lourve around 3 in the afternoon, I was a very unhappy camper, and totally expecting to be perked up by the most famous art museum I know. We walked into the courtyard from a side entrance, and the first words out of Tim's mouth were, "The Land at Disney World is more impressive." Totally true. And I feel this picture shows my sentiments...

Old buildings that surround a medium sized glass triangle. Big whup. Although I was surprised, and even more disappointed to find out that the glass pyramid is actually the entrance. If it were an art sculpture that isn't practical, it might be a bit cooler. But no.

We make it in, rather quickly actually, so that was a definite plus. We figure out how to get to the Mona Lisa, where we were meeting Ryan and Kristan. I think its interesting that instead of signs to the famous pieces, they just have pictures of the art with arrows pointing the right way. Smart, really. But we kept on walking endless hallways of old art until we got to the Mona Lisa, where we took the obligatory pictures.

We found a bench and waited for our lovely pals, who found us super quick and were as unenthused as we were. But being in the Lourve, we figured we had to see at least part of it.

Ryan was interested in the Egyptian stuff, so we headed there. I must admit, once we got there it was cool. Not the actual artifacts, but the rooms. It used to be a palace, so the moldings and paintings of each room were totally different, but very fascinating to look at....for 30 seconds per room.

The Egyptian section was huge, but we made it through, and made it to the basement, where they have the old Moat to the palace. I really liked that part. Back up to exit, where I took a picture of Venus de Milo's (aka Aphrodite's) butt. Everyone takes the picture from the front! I went against the grain...

We also found a boy who finally got sick of Afflack commercials...

We searched the million different gift shops in the middle of the Museum, and still found nothing for the people we wanted to get things for. I LOVE art museum gift shops, I really do. I usually could spend hours there, but the ones there were really disappointing. The only cool part was they had a separate gift shop for kid stuff only. Still found nothing. BUT! We did find the one and only Starbucks of the WHOLE trip. If we werent on our way to dinner and the line wasnt 20 people long, I would have indulged in its awesomeness (yes, I like my corporate latte, sue me).

And then....it was the icing on the cake of an awful EF experience...but more on that later :)

Evening of Parisian Tourist.

So after buying our weight in souvenirs, we still had some time to kill, so we mosied over to this cute little bookstore. Every piece of information on Paris said that we should visit this bookstore. It was cute, but still, its books!

After that, Kristan's goal was to find a street vendor with crepes. This seemed to be a much more daunting task than expected! We all wanted to sit somewhere, so finding a crepe stand, on the street, with somewhere we could sit closeby...was a challenge, but we found this cute little bakery that had an outside seating area with a vendor right next door. The boys went to save our spot while we tried to figure out what the french words were so we knew what kind of crepes we were ordering. We ended up with one sugar and one nutella. Yum.
It was cute though, Ryan loved his nutella and Tim just loves his street food! And we all loved the rest that we got under the heat lamps.

By the end of our snack, we made our way to the Eiffel Tower to meet up with the rest of the group. The meeting point and time was vague, so we ended up by ourselves for the first half hour wondering if anyone else was going to show. But it gave us lots of time to take pictures of the gorgeous tower in the night sky with lots of twinkling lights.



We perked up significantly when at least our girls joined us!

But slowly they all trickled in, including Omar (surprise). And we made our way up the tower. I wasn't nervous at all, until we were getting ready to board the elevator, and then I slightly had a mental conversation with myself. At the halfway platform, I was pretty much done. But everyone else was going all the way up, I had to too! It was gorgeous. You could see absolutely EVERYTHING.

At the top though, I was definitely happy sticking close to the inside wall. It's silly, but I felt like I might tip it over! Eek! This picture has the smile of pure terror! But I pass it off well, right?

Getting down from the top took a solid half hour, and I was frozen solid, so Tim and I passed on the river cruise that night, we had heard it was pretty boring, so we made our way back to the hotel. On our way, the girls randomly met us on the Metro, and once back at the hotel, Tim had dinner with them at the hotel restaurant and I took the most glorious shower of ALL TIME. And a knock at the door! Tim brought me Le Cube. It was the best dessert in Paris, best dessert with the best name. A cube of brownie with almost a totally raw fudge center, and a cube of vanilla bean sauce. A perfect way to end a totally exhausting day in Paris...

You know you want to eat LE CUBE!

Paris. The Touristy Day.

Our first full day in Paris, we hitched a ride in on the "tour bus" from the hotel into Paris. We lucked out, and the first thing it passed was the Insitution Nationale Des Invalides. It's a military museum that was converted from a military hospital, and is still in use for some vets today. But its the home of the tomb of Napoleon, as well as a HUGE exhibit on France's involvement in every war ever. Lots of guns, costumes, and more guns. Not so hot on that part.
The tomb was pretty sweet though. It was ginormous. Placed in a sub level of the building, the tomb itself is the size of a classroom. All that for such a tiny guy!

We spent most of the morning at that museum, wandering through the room upon endless rooms of war memorabilia. But finally we emerged! We headed toward the Catacombes. I thought I knew what to expect with the catacombes, but what I got was about ten times more intense. We descended the stairs to go six stories underground (no surprise there) and oddly found ourselves walking probably close to a mile around winding hallways no more than 5 feet wide. There were random holes in the walls that were pitch black and RIDICULOUSLY creepy. Finally, we got to the sacred grounds. I thought we would walk into a few rooms with bones in carvings in the walls. Boy was I wrong.

We walked probably close to another full mile, on four/five foot wide sidewalks, lined with bones. Not just random piles of bones, but bones perfectly stacked four/five feet high endlessly. It was probably a good six feet deep to the walls. The skulls and leg bones were in front, and made into crazy designs in the stackings. It never ended. Severely creeped out at first (Tim took way longer to get acclamated than I) by the end of the mile, I was not scared, but definitely ready to leave. It was insane. We thought about the air we were breathing, what it was going into our lungs from that many bones. The ceilings (just above our heads) dripped, making the ground muddy, we commented on the bone juice on the bottoms of our jeans and shoes.

But the craziest part, was in the formations of bones, you could see that some were missing, and I told Tim, "How sick does a person have to be to take bones from here" Well, at the end of the walk, they search your bags, and sure enough, the one guy searching bags at the end, had a rather large pile of bones next to him that he had seized just that morning. Including a full skull. Sick people. What would you do with it? Something tells me thats not something you put on ebay or craigslist. It's also strange to think about how many relatives we each passed in walking through. There were more than thousands of people down there, we had to have passed a distant relative at some point. Strange to think about....

After looking at dead people, we had worked up quite the appetite and stopped into the first place that looked decent. It turned out to be this cute little pizza place that had AMAZING pizza, the size of my head! We each got one, thinking they would be smaller, and geeze were they big!! But the boys ate all of theirs, cause they are boys....go figure.

I told you it was big! But we moved on towards Notre Dame, but on our way, magically came across Sainte Chapelle, one of the churches that I wanted to check out while we were in Paris. Since it was the first Sunday of the month, it was free, but that also means there was a huge line outside. In the FREEZING cold. But we waited, we stomped, we shivered, we moaned. But we waited, and we were glad we did. Its a church inside of a courtyard of another building. The main floor is nothing special, and after waiting so long, I was super scared that that was all there was....and then we went up the side stairs....

It was gorgeous. HUGE windows. Several stories tall, a dozen or so around the building with a rosette in the back. Each one had 100s of smaller paned glass windows that had stained glass in them, each telling a story. There were over one thousand story windows in the church. It was gorgeous. We could have sat up there for much longer if it werent for the fact that there wasnt a square foot of heat in the whole place. Beautiful place though. Even the stonework on the door as you exit was intricate and perfect.

It was getting late in the day, and Notre Dame was just around the corner, so we headed there. This is going to sound crazy, but I really thought it would be bigger! Not necessarily taller, but wider. I don't know, it just wasn't what i expected. But the front entry doors looked really sweet.

Free Sunday meant it was super crowded, but we made our way through, looking all around the church. Unfortunately, we just missed the closing time to go up into the towers, but, we still got to see plenty of the church to fill our desire.

After Notre Dame, it was getting dark, so we hit up some gift shops to kill time before the rest of our evening began!

Brussels Bongo

Between Amsterdam and Paris, we had a day of travel, with a few hours stop in Brussels, Belgium. I don't think I knew a single thing about Brussels before we went. I'm not even sure I knew it was in Belgium. Now I know everything I need to know...that I want to go back.

We spent the morning on the bus, driving to Brussels. The bus was pretty much silent the entire ride. People still drunk, high, or just so partied out that they passed out completely. And for us kids that didn't try to kill ourselves with such intense partying, it was still early. I think I was one of the only ones, counting the driver, that stayed awake the whole ride.

On the outskirts of Brussels, the bus made a quick photostop at the Atomium. I had never even heard of the Atomium, and I was not in store for the War of the Worlds crazy alien structure that we encountered.

It's so much bigger than you can even imagine. Each one of the little globulals has something in it, like a theater, a restaurant, a shop, its crazy. Just bam! Right in the middle of the street. Very cool. Very odd.

Once in Brussels, we walked through the streets of downtown, and there was a stretch of several blocks that was solid restaurants. Not just any restaurants, but seafood restaurants. And it was about 10am at the time, and they were all setting up these giant stands right outside the front doors, FILLED with fresh seafood of all sorts on top of a mountain of ice. It was all beautifully arranged. I wanted to just stop and eat at all of them right there.

We continued walking through the city square, a big open square surrounded by old school beautiful government buildings, and it seemed that all streets led to this City Square.

We walked through this square and headed straight to Mannequin Pis, the statue of the peeing baby. Its at the end of a random normal street, and the statue is probably only 18 inches tall. It seems so unimportant to be the entire symbol of Brussels.

Apparently, its normally dressed up in strange costumes, but we happened to see it on a day where it wasn't, so that was sad. But right next door, was heaven. No really, it was this little stand, only an open window that you order from, but you order waffles. Not just regular waffles, but waffles that seem to be coated with crystalized sugar, and then topped with anything you want. Fruit, chocolate, whipped cream. ANYTHING.
If I could that waffle every day. I would. And then I would need liposuction every Christmas. But I am ok with that! The amount of walking might burn off a bite or two. Cause we did a lot of walking through Brussels, cruising through the tourist shops, looking at all the crazy tourist stuff. It was more than Amsterdam had, but it was fun. There was a LOT of Mannequin Pis stuff, including corkscrews, and even this candy shop had this setup:

I like to call it "Taste the Rainbow." There were a lot of cute candy, chocolate, and cookie shops.

It was like straight out of Hogsmeade, super cute, cookies and candy and chocolate lining the walls with bright colors and yummy carbs. Sadly, not all of the occupants of Brussels get to enjoy such shops. I have a strange affection for homeless people that have animals.

It kills me to see how much they love their pet, and that they would rather feed their best friend of a dog than themselves. I want to take them home with me.

Brussels was also the city that we experienced the black bathrooms. No, not racial, but IN THE DARK bathrooms. Before getting on the bus, we decided to try to find a bathroom, and found a little place that had some. Only, when Ryan and I went to go first, we discovered that there were no lights for the bathrooms! WHO PEES IN THE DARK?!? Not just no lights in the stalls, but the stall was a room to itself, and therefore was pitch black. It was a very scary experience to say the least.

Back on the bus, it was on our way to Paris! We had quite an adventure that first night, but that is a post all on its own!

The bus ride to Paris.


This might be sunrise, but hey, its still really pretty.