Le OpenTour bus, excellent way to see Paris!

One of the churches we visited. Awesome architecture in this city and everything is OLD!

I have no proof, but this could be the pigeon from Bali. Click here for that story...

This is Marg getting her picture drawn by the artists who mobbed in the alley ways and ambushed you to do your portrait.

Some big tower in the middle of Paris :)

View from the top of the Effiel Tower.

A long, long way from home... This was the furthest location I could find at the top of the tower.

Euro Adventure - Paris

I've now been in Paris for two days now and so far it's very cool.

Amsterdam was excellent, the people are very friendly and laid back and eager to help.  The taxi drivers are very friendly too and have a passion
for delivering you to your destination in the fastest possible time.  We had a clone of Vin Diesel take us to the airport in his large Mercedes who
obviously thought he had the KGB or someone tailing him as I don't feel he was aquainted with the brake peddal, only the accelerator.  He did this
ofcourse without ever getting off the phone.

One thing I noticed about Amsterdam is that no one is fat.  The only fat people are tourists.  This could be on account of the hundreds of
thousands of pushbikes everywhere.  There's nearly more bikes on the street than Bali.  Everyone from homeless people to executives dressed in
suits is on a bike.  They all smoke like trains, but no one is fat.  No one.

We wandered past one of the red light districts on the way back to our hotel one afternoon and that was a pretty enlightening experience.  Pretty
much a buffet on display from which you can pick and choose what you want. Pretty crazy...

The flight from Amsterdam to Heathrow then to Paris was pretty straight forward.  We arrived late Saturday night and there was next to no one at
the airport.  The place was empty, shops shut down everything.  Took an age for our bags to turn up but eventually they did.

We're staying at the Royal Hotel right near the famous Champs Ellysee and the Arc de Triumphe.  None of my spelling is going to be right, but I'm
trying.  The website is www.hroy.com.  The room is even smaller than the one I was in in Amsterdam.  At first I couldn't find the bathroom until I
looked in the closet and there it was, in a space that would only just be considered a closet in the Southern Hemisphere.

People here aren't as willing to speak English or New Zealand.  Don and Marg who I'm here with have been trying the whole 'Lets speak French'
thing, but I realise I can't do it and will probably make more trouble for myself if I try, so I just speak English to them.

We got up early on Sunday (ie 8am) and went out to find breakfast to find that the Champs Ellysee, one of the most famous streets in Europe was
deserted.  These guys are not keen on early mornings here.  Eventually we did find a place to eat, but they only offered crossiants, toast and
coffee.  Bacon and eggs are not the deal here...

The Effiel Tower was next on the list and we lined up to buy tickets to get to the top.  The French dont' seem to have the whole queuing system sorted yet.  You queue up to buy the tickets but as soon as you've got the tickets, you're stuck in the queue lining up with no way to get out.  A bit of a shambles but worth it to get up the tower.

The tower is huge.  The elevator goes to the mid way section and you have to change elevators to continue up.  Once at the top, the view over Paris is breath taking.  You can see everything.  The place was crowded with people from EVERYWHERE.  There were Texans, Irish people, Russians, British, Germans, Israelis, everywhere.  And pretty much everyone was phoning someone, so I phoned mum from the top of the Eiffel tower to gloat.

As we were about to go back down I noticed that on the roof, there were flags of pretty much every nationality with the distance to the designated city.  I looked but I could find no where that was further away than Wellington, New Zealand.  18,962km from the top of the Eiffel tower.  I was pretty much on the other side of the world from home.

At the bottom of the tower Mititary officers patrol with machine guns, ready to bust some ass if you're stupid enough to leave you bags
unattended, just like the guy sitting next to us did.  I had been sitting waiting for Don to finish his hot dog when dudes with machine guns
suddenly arrived looking tense.  They didn't look like the same guys who blew up the Rainbow Warrior though.  Numbnuts who had left his bags alone ran over and apologised and the machine guns left.  Minutes later numbnuts was off without his bags.  Secretly I wished the machine gun boys would drop a smoke bomb in his bags to teach him a lesson.

We took a van tour which was ok.  The Church of Notre Dame is a place to be seen.  Took them 200 years to build the thing.  It's insane.  I'd just
finished reading 'The Da Vinci Code' so visiting the Louvre Art Mueseum was interesting, but we never actually went inside.  The place is massive,
you'd need days to visit that place.  The grounds alone are breath taking.

Napolean obviously had a good grip on this place, there's monuments dedicated to him left and right.  Serious monuments too.

It's great to see that Europeans have embraced the use of the Euro currency cause they sure know how to use it!  Everything is in Euros what
it would be in dollars here.  For example, a small, small coffee is three euros (AU$6 or NZ$7).  I'm past caring though, here to enjoy myself.

I lost my cellphone in a sidewalk cafe and only realised this when I got back to the hotel.  Luckily after an Olympic sprint retracing my steps I
located it.

Today we cruised round in large open top double decker buses getting on and off where we wanted, was great.  We spent a lot of time in an area
full of artists who were desperate to draw your picture in return for relieving you off precious Euros.  There was about 12 of these guys
working as a team.  Those of you who have been to Bali and see the beach traders will know what I mean.  Eventually we relented and got drawings done.  They tend to use artistic licence a bit I think so you'll feel happy paying them the 20 Euro fee.  Don and Marg reckon my drawing looks like some guy called 'Rock' off 'The Young and the Restless'.  I on the other hand feel it looks like a tyrannical dictator.  If George Bush see's
it he's going to want to rid me of Weapons of Mass Destruction...

Early Wednesday morning we fly out to London for a few days there where I'm staying with a mate from high school which will be fun.  Hopefully it
won't rain, but it is England I suppose.  Friday we leave for Melbourne.

Page Three - London