Paris! After breakfast there was a free tour of the city so of course we took advantage of it. It was by the same company that did my tour of Edinburgh and this one was just as good. We walked all along the river Seine, past statues, various artifacts that Napoleon 'received' from countries he invaded. The French like to call those artifacts 'gifts.' We walked past The Louvre, Napoleon's burial site, and a bunch more French stuff. It was pouring rain, luckily I had my coat and hood, but Jeff left the umbrella Nancy sent with him back at the hostel so he was drenched. (this is the only day of rain we've had... so far it's just cost us weight on RyanAir!)

The sun was peeking out so we headed for the Eiffel Tower. That was great, we didn't wait too long and the view was awesome. There is an ugly black office building near the tower, and the locals say that the best view of the city is from the top of that building because A) it has a great view of the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triumph , etc. and B) you can't see how ugly it is from on top of it.

The Arc de Triumph was pretty cool, it's in the middle of a roundabout where 12 streets meet. I still don't understand how round-abouts work but I guess they do, it just seems to me like you shouldn't move into the middle if you ever want to get out again but I didn't see the same car doing loops around the inside so it must not be too hard.

We met up with a local I had met in Edinburgh, she took us around a little and we went to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. Not sure how it's even famous, other than that Da Vinci said it was his best work, and I'm not sure why he'd even say that! We were pretty arted-out by this point, anything that's not painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel doesn't even make a blip on our radars at this point, so we made a quick loop through the ancient Egyptian artifacts (more 'gifts') and headed out. You could probably spend the better part of a year wandering through there. Supposedly it's 4 times as long as the Eiffel Tower is tall (that's a fact from Jeff so I'd double check that before trusting the source).

After that we went to the Arc de Triumph. I was actually looking forward to trying to dodge 13 lanes of traffic to get underneath it; almost like a test after practicing in Madrid, Athens, and Roma. Unfortunately they have a passage under the road, which takes most of the fun out of the Arc but that's ok I guess.

We walked past where Napoleon's ashes are. They honored his wishes and buried him at ground level so that anyone who came to see him had to bend over and bow to actually look in at his tomb. People say that when Hitler went to Paris he took a mirror so he could look down into the tomb without bowing, but his hat blew off and he had to bend all the way over to pick it up off the grave.

All that touristy stuff made us hungry so my friend took us to a real French restaurant to eat fondue and French onion soup. I had fondue, I have to say, the chocolate fondue with marshmallows is a little better than cheese and bread, but normal fondue is good too. Plus they gave me little forks to dip and eat with so I was content.

When we got back to the hostel we decided it was probably a good idea to try to book a hostel for the next night in Amsterdam… all week there had been no availability anywhere so our expectations weren't too high. Again, by the Grace of God, we found 2 beds. I must have checked the site just as they were updating the cancelations because I'd click it and there'd be 2 beds but they'd be gone a second later, somehow I timed it right and got them reserved.

That night we were looking forward to a good night sleep so we headed up to our room to find that our roommates were apparently pretty popular and had invited most of the hostel to our room for a party… needless to say the morning came up pretty fast.