Sorry we haven’t been great about updating. I keep forgetting since we no longer have a computer. Today’s our last day! So sad but we had a lot of fun and did a lot of unique and interesting things in Paris. This will be short cause we’re about to go to dinner but we’ll see you soon! Au revoir! I’ll make some posts tomorrow in the airport!

Tired but we had a good day. Versaille tomorrow. Will try to post something in the afternoon!

(View from our hotel balcony.) Happy
Bastille day! We went to the lourve, tuileries, the opera district, and did a bunch of walking around those areas. We’re going to go drink some wine and watch some fireworks maybe over by the Eiffel tower. Hope all is well!

Paris!

We have been in Paris for a couple hours now. It was raining fairly hard, so of course we got lost getting off the metro, went to the wrong hotel (there are 2 “Timhotel Montparnasses” within 0.5 km of each other, FYI), and got soaking wet in the process. But we’re here now and ready to get passed that!

Prior to all of this, we’ve had a great past couple of days. We had really spotty Internet access in Amsterdam so it was difficult to update you from there, but we had a lot of fun. We went to several museums, an “ice bar” (google it! pretty ridiculous), a comedy show, and even a casino. We actually quadrupled the amount of money we decided to allocate to that venture, so we did alright for ourselves! We had a lot of fun and hopefully Paris treats us just as well as the rest of our stops have thus far. Tomorrow is Bastille Day so I expect we will see some interesting things!

Edit: (just so i can remember) We also did a bus tour, the van gogh museum, saw a Stanley Kubrick exhibit at the film institute, took a canal boat ride, and went to the Heineken factory. Pictures to come later!

We’re in Amsterdam. We did a little bit of walking near our hotel after dinner but no major sightseeing today. We’re in a residential part of the city. Its actually really pretty. Tomorrow should be fun!

Amsterdam

About to get on the train to Amsterdam (1:30pm). Brussels was pretty cool. It felt much more European and josh had to use a bit of French to communicate. It’s pretty quiet compared to london but we got a lot of waffles, chocolate, beer and cheese and had a relaxing night watching BBC and reading and playing games in the hotel after we explored the city for a bit! So excited for Amsterdam!

Ankle

Also, special update on my ankle (mostly for my mom). No swelling, no pain in the side that broke and we’ve been walking at least 6ish miles a day. I have some pain in the top of my foot for the past couple days when I walk, but I guess that’s just from using muscles that have been unused for a while. So far so good!

We just got to our hotel in Brussels and now I really feel like we’re in Europe. London was very clean and just about as commercialized as America as far as advertisements everywhere, so many gift shops, shopping malls etc. It would not really be too hard of an adjustment. It was a good starting point to ease in to the trip and we had a lot of fun exploring the city. So in Brussels, we managed to find our way out of the train station and we thought we were in walking distance but google lied. We were actually like 2 miles away so we took the metro a couple stops and still ended up walking further than we thought with our luggage down cobblestone streets. Not too easy. (we’ll take a taxi when we leave tomorrow!) Side note: Getting around has been made very easy with smartphones and Internet. Usually we can get Internet at the stations and google maps tells us the metro lines, buses, walking directions, etc. Not sure how we would be doing without it. Yay Internet! Anyways, we made it to the hotel. Half of it looks really old and half of it very modern. Luckily we’re in the nicer half. Our room looks like its from ikea. We’re going to go out in a bit and explore. Glad to be back where there’s euros. London was insanely expensive. Everything cost in pounds what I thought it would cost in dollars in NYC.
Example, the one meal at which we sat down with a waitress we ordered the two cheapest pizzas on the menu and two sodas. We paid 25 with tip which in usd is like $40. No meal was under $20 and we don’t have particularly expensive taste. One interesting thing is that food was cheaper if you took it to go so we ate outside at the various squares and parks and it was really nice. I actually preferred doing this. Now the usd to euro exchange rate is much more reasonable so we can spend a bit more here. Long stream of conscious post! Glad to be here although we loved London! We don’t have Internet in the room and we no longer have a computer so limited pictures and posts for now. Hope everyone is doing well in the US! Hopefully the storms cooperated and the myrtle beach trip was possible for Ed, Shannon, and Hunter!

Last day in London :(

Today we finished up our last day here with a walk past the London 10K, a distant view of the 2012 Olympic Park, a trip to the London Zoo, and a ride in the London Eye! We have an early morning tomorrow so this will have to be brief, but we’ve enjoyed our trip a lot thus far. I (Josh) am going to try and go the next day and a half eating waffles at every meal because our next stop (and post) will be in Brussels, Belgium!

Edit: Here are the rest of the pictures from the last few days: http://www.flickr.com/photos/82178546@N07/sets/72157630485917186/with/7530862032/

Also, according to our Fitbit/pedometer, we walked roughly 37.3 miles over the course of 5 days in London! Not positive how accurate that is, but I’m willing to bet that it’s pretty close.

Short post yesterday but we did a lot! We also saw
Singin’ in the Rain in the theatre district. They made it rain on stage and kicked water on the audience. It was really good and we had fun 🙂

Today we had a little bit shorter of a day so we actually are doing some relaxing at the hotel. We went to the Globe Theatre (recreated but still neat). We saw live actors warming up for a show after our tour. Then we went to Tate modern and looked at a little bit of modern art. Lots of very weird stuff! We crossed the millennium bridge and went to St. Paul’s cathedral which was pretty amazing inside. No photography allowed unfortunately but I accidentally left my camera switched on last night so it was dead when we were out. Thus not a lot of pictures. We went to Oxford circus and Piccadilly circus and did a little bit of shopping. We found a cool toy store but that area is essentially the Times Square of London so it was super crowded everywhere we tried to go. When we were headed back to the hotel we walked right by the World Pride festival and there were masses of people in the streets. Apparently Boy George had just performed. Kind of interesting! Glad we made it back without losing eachother! We ordered food in the hotel and decided to just relax for the night. We want to go on the London eye when it’s dark out but it doesn’t get dark here until like 9:45 and we were too worn out to do it tonight.
So our last day is tomorrow and were going to do that, check out the Olympic
Area east of the system, and do some shopping . We’ve already seen a lot! I think we spent a good amount of time here to get a good feel of the city. I really like it here! We’ll post some pictures in a bit.