A word to the wise.

When you're travelling, and carrying lots of luggage, you have to make a choice. You can either find a place close to the train station or airport, and have a potentially long journey into the sight seeing, or you can choose to stay somewhere close to the sight seeing, and lug your luggage (obviously) half way across town on public transport to get it to your hotel.

I sincerely and earnestly counsel the former. It's a much better plan, I think, to catch public transport for an hour, without the added burden of 30kg of clothing and already accrued souvenirs. I wish we'd caught a plane into Amsterdam, as the hotel we ended up choosing was near there, rather than near the train station... we had the best of both worlds in that case. We had to haul ourselves 30 minutes out of town with our luggage, then 30 minutes back into town without it to look around... rinse and repeat.

We tried not to make that mistake again, let me assure you.

The Coffee Shop

Next stop Amsterdam, home to decriminalized marijuana, and institutionalized prostitution. Neither of which are really of any interest to me, especially having seen them up close. The whole place is entirely too in your face to actually be comfortable, and the two unique services they offer absolutely require your comfort to partake.

If anything, those two scenes in Amsterdam have become a parody of themselves, the red light district, such as it is, is ridiculous. For every red light in the window, 90% are empty, and the one or two that are open are surrounded by what I assume to be at least one "protector of female integrity" (read: pimp).

As for the other scene that Amsterdam is so famous for... the less said the better. Every customer looked like they had just gotten off the plane from Byron Bay, and the places look like the kind of place you would avoid at all costs in any other city.

The food was good though. And the souvenir shops selling mary jane leaf tea towels and hardcore playing cards outnumbered everything else by at least a factor of two. Overall, the place is colourful enough, which was a nice change from the almost limitless shades of gray that Paris had to offer.

Its not so bad really

Once you get used to it, Paris is not all that bad. By the third day we had figured out the rail system. I almost wished that someone would ask us how it worked, so we could pretend we did not speak English, like I am sure most of the people we asked were doing.

At least cheeseburger and Coke in French is cheeseburger and Coke... I also caved and ordered a Royale with Cheese. It just had to be done.

The washing powder smell

It´s Paris, it´s raining, and every five minutes there´s an overpowering smell of washing powder. Quite strange really. Maybe the people walk around with small packets in their pockets to cover the smell of the ever-present cigarettes. The first full day in Paris was the only one with no rain. I think the city was trying to lull us into a false sense of security. Then it smashed us in the face with an almost unintelligible rail system, and the fact that despite all advertising and word of mouth, almost no-one here speaks English. Thankyou highschool French, for being the only way we could tell our cab driver the address of our second hotel in France.

The first hotel was "interesting". You´d be mistaken for thinking that a double room in a hotel that was costing €100 a night would have a double bed. This place had a single sofa bed... and a roll out trundle bed underneath that. Suffice it to say we were unimpressed, and had we not prepaid before we left Sydney we would not have stayed. At least it was close to the train station... of course we caught a cab from there.

Where to even start...

Probably at the start, as with most things. The first night, in Hong Kong. There were, as you´d expect, lots of people. Seemingly with nothing else to do but walk around, the same way we were. We were not there for more than five usable hours (travel time and airport waiting seems to sum up a lot of our holiday so far), so there´s not really much to tell about this stop.