I was going to have a lay day today as I should have been going to CouchSurf in Saint-Pierre des Corp in the Loire Valley, but after a meltdown last night when I surfed the net to arrange my transport to Cinque Terre (which didn't look that far on a map) and discovered that I'd either need to take a seventeen hour overnight train journey, changing trains three times or get back to Paris (a two hour train trip from Saint-Pierre des Corp) then a one and a quarter h...

I wanted to see the famous (or should that be infamous) Moulin Rouge, immortalised in Baz Luhrmann's musical of the same name, so headed to Montmartre by my favourite mode of transport, the Metro. There was also a beautiful church near Montmartre, called Sacre Coeur, that I was told was worth seeing. While waiting at Gare de l'Est where I changed trains, there was lots of whistle blowing (not the trains) and police running around the place, not sure what was happ...

After taking the tiny rickety lift to my room in Paris, I was excited to be staying in building which I guess was probably a couple of hundred years old. Why did I think this? The ceiling had crooked beams which look like and optical illusion in the photos, but they really were that crooked…and the doorway was so very low. I loved the black and white wallpaper, bright green paint and purple curtains. And turns out I was sleeping, not only in the same room, but ...

After booking our train tickets for tomorrow (mine to Paris, Hayley's to Salzburg) I tried for the second time to withdraw money from an ATM, with no luck. I rang the NAB in Australia twice only to discover on the second call (after a total of forty minutes on hold, (I'd hate to be paying my phone bill) that the money I'd transferred into the account before I left still hadn't come through - looks as though my trip to Europe might be on Hayley. We spent some tim...

We caught a local bus to Volendam a small fishing village described by Floor and Michel as a typical traditional Dutch village. The buildings here were very different to those in Amsterdam, while still being narrow their windows are very different. All have a large window on the ground floor with cream or white lace or sheer curtains and decorations (plants/ornaments) on the sill. Now when I say all of them were like this you might be thinking that there had to b...