Europe 2010

Back and time for another update. Updating this time is a little more difficult with a German keyboard.

From where we left off, having survived the bar crawl and enjoying it thoroughly we managed to get out of bed and to the British museum sometime after midday. What can be said about the British museum? On the whole it is simply a collection of stuff the Poms have stolen from various nations over the years. These ranged from small artifacts through to the walls of the Parthenon, several mummies and a bunch of other crazy crap. By the time we’d seen the British museum both the Tower of London and Westminster abbey were closed. This made for an interesting mission the next morning when, before we went to Amiens, Pixie and Hansen did a whirlwind tour of Westminster in 45 minutes and still managed to see all the dead kings, queens and important people.

We woke early on ANZAC day to get the bus to the dawn service and do the battlefield tour. The dawn service was absolutely brilliant and definitely worth the early start. Touring the battlefields was a huge eye-opener given the ridiculous number of people that died over the tiny patch of land for which they were fighting. We made it to Paris and had an early night.

The next morning saw us off on another walking tour. The free walking tour showed off the major sights of Paris including Notre Dame, The Louvre, Eiffel Tower and the obelisk. After the tour we checked out the Louvre and briefly saw the Mona Lisa. This would have been far more impressive with the aid of binoculars but some of the other paintings and artifacts were still worth the entrance fee 🙂 That evening we partook in the very French activity of sitting in a park eating cheese and drinking red wine. It was a very difficult way of spending the evening. 🙂

The next day we jumped on the Metro and headed off to the Arc de Triomphe, Champs Elysees and joined the three hour line ride to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower. The views of the city were definitely worth the wait. That night we did another walking tour but this time of the Montmarte region which started out the front of the Moulin Rouge. After this tour we found a nice little French restaurant were Alan and Hansen sampled the tasty local delicacy of snails in garlic butter.

Having had our fill of the French (two days was more than enough) we jumped on a train and headed up a few hours north to Amsterdam. It was immediately less high-strung than Paris but accomodation was next to impossible to find with the Queens birthday being on the 30th April and the population of Amsterdam more than doubling. As a result we had to cut our stay in Amsterdam short by a day but we still got in a red light district tour, a bike tour and joined a bunch of other Aussies and Dutch for a barbeque on the roof of someone’s apartment block. Not a bad way to celebrate the Queen’s birthday.

This morning we headed off to the train station to embark on a six and half hour marathon train ride to Berlin from where we are currently writing. The plan at this stage is to go on some more walking tours of the city and surrounds and generally avoid the neo-nazis that will be parading around tomorrow (May day).

This is the Pixie dictatorial service for the spoken word of Hansen signing off.