The Trek to Gay Pari!

Amsterdam was such a friendly City. Everyone was so accommodating. The locals seemed to take great pride in their City; it was clean, the museums were extremely well maintained. Everyone (including people in nice clothes and suites) rode bikes or walked everywhere. Hopefully, I will have another opportunity to visit.

On our way to Paris, we had a 3 hour layover in Geneva, Switzerland, so we took the train into the City and had a quick look around and lunch.

Switzerland was absolutely beautiful. The air was crisp and clean. Everyone spoke French, which was a pretty good introduction that I didn't know quite as much French as I'd hoped. C'est la vie.


Lake Geneva



Fountain in the Jardin de Anglais (park just across the Lake Geneva bridge).

Once we arrived in Paris, we made our way to the hotel. I called a week before we left for Europe to verify our room confirmation, but guess what...no room (a practice that we learned was very common place. Someone said that hotel owners are called "sleep merchants." Due to a high demand for hotels, some feel as though they can do as they wish and get away with it. Most Americans, like us, were too time pressed to look for another hotel). After a bit of a headache, we were able solidify a room next door for the night. Our hotel promised us that they would have our room ready the next day...which they did. They were pretty cool after that.

After we dropped our luggage off at the worst room ever (no pics unfortunately; but lets just say that it's everything I imagined a "pay by the hour" place to be), we headed to the middle of Montmartre. What a cool area! We found the cabaret, Au Lapin Agile, a popular hangout for all of the old artists that lived in the area. Before you even saw the place at the top of a hill, you could hear the piano playing and everyone singing french songs. I loved it!