Paris

Day 1: This was the first real day of our Contiki tour.  Everyone was pretty quiet at first, probably due to the 6am meeting time and shyness.  We met a few interesting people throughout our ferry from Port Dover and in our campsite in Paris, mostly Australians with some Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders and South Africans in the mix.  We also met Alim's cousin from Hamilton, Farhan! Also, two of the American girls are from Michigan and go to school in Ann Arbor, where I went to a conference at the Ross School of Business.  We reminisced about Jimmy John's (food) and Rick's (student bar).

In the evening, we wandered under and around the Eiffel Tower at sunset while students protested nearby and police wielding machine guns patrolled the area.  At night we took a night bus tour of Paris, which is even more beautiful under the lights.  Our bus driver took us around the famous roundabout circling the Arc de Triumph as "Highway to the Danger Zone" pumped on the stereo.  Cars come flying into the roundabout at breakneck speeds and there is an accident on the thing about every 6 minutes!

Louis Vuitton and 2000 rollerbladers in Paris

Day 2: We hit up the Louvre first thing in the morning to avoid the crazy line ups that accumulate throughout the day.  The Mona Lisa was much smaller than we expected and there is just so much art, you could never soak it all in.  Apparently, King Louis XIV thought the place was too small for him and moved out. We wandered the Champs d'Elyse and ate Nutella crepes (mmm...) and had a bribe offered to us by a Beijing couple who wanted us to take their money and get them a Louis Vuitton handbag.

At the end of the day we left ourselves lots of time to get back to the meeting point for the bus. After wandering a bit, we realized we were a bit lost so we thought we would hail a cab. Apparently, you can't hail cabs in the middle of the street, which we learned after 10 minutes of wildly waving and running into the road in attempts to get one.  Asking for directions to a taxi stop didn't help when some rude people were not very helpful and a cab driver wouldn't take us to the Musee d'Orsee. Finally, we got to the Musee and had to cross the street to our meeting place, just to be blocked by 2000 rollerbladers blading and waving down the main street!  Of course, our bus had left just before they got their and we had to navigate our way home on the train, metro and bus system of Paris, getting some odd stares along the way.

At night, we wandered the red light district near the Moulin Rouge while others caught a cabaret show. We've seen lots of boobs in our day, so Chuey and I opted out of the show.  At O'Sullivans, we enjoyed beverages and realized the bar catered mostly to tourists, and moreso it was filled with Australians pretending to be French to pick up girls.

On our cab ride home, the driver got lost and overcharged us.  With the resident French student passed out in the front seat and the other Michiganian / Michiganer drunkenly asking me to cook her food, I tried to negotiate a lower fare in broken French and understood just enough to know that he was going to call the police if we didn't pay the full price.