EuroTrip...Prague, Czech Republic

Our train to Prague was a pretty early one and rather than trying to navigate the public transport in Berlin to the train station, mom arranged for us the same transfer that shuttled from the airport over to the hotel.  We arrive in plenty of time and grab a sandwich and coffee to eat on the train ride which was almost 5 hours.  Also popped into a pharmacy at the train station as my face broke out into some type of itchy rash while in Berlin.  I think we are blaming it on the sheets or pillow b/c that was the only city it happened in!  I grabbed some over the counter allergy meds similar to a benadryl and it helped clear it up.  Okay so enough about all that.

The train ride ended up being quite pleasant.  I slept for the first couple of hours while mom read her infamous travel books.  Then after I woke up, to my surprise it was pretty scenic.  Our train passed through several little German Willages (villages, but the Germans pronounce their v's like a w). And there was a river than ran along the villages as well.

Once we arrived in Prague, that is a whole other fun story at the train station!  This is the first time we were dealing in a different currency that we weren't really familiar with.  All places except London took the Euro and in London it was the Pound.  Here in the Czech Republic their currency was called the Koruna.  In order to get to our hotel we needed to take both a subway and a tram.  Thankfully the subway connected at the train station but alas we needed to buy a ticket and the machine only accepted coins.  Mom pulls out about 2000 Koruna which equated to about $108 US.  Well guess what happens, they spit a 2000 paper note out from the ATM machine!  We needed coins people.  I then try and break the large note and buy a sprite and a twix and the lady at the register wouldn't accept the bill.  She told me it wasn't her problem that I had the big bill.  She was a bitch so I walked out of there and left everything on the counter.  I really wanted that twix too, dammit!  Finally we get that whole situation sorted out.  I won't bore you with the nitty gritty details.  Make it on the subway just fine, and on the tram just fine.  We get off at the specified stop and then don't know where to go.  The directions weren't corresponding with what was actually in front of us.  At one point we just pick a rode and a direction, and by the Grace of God, we end up on the street we need to be.  First thing we hear as we walk up to the reception desk to check in "we have a problem with your reservation."  Aww shit, now what?!  Well somehow they over booked the hotel we were supposed to stay at so they push us over to one of their sister hotels in another part of the town.  Our new hotel was now, Hotel Roma.  Sounds authentic, right?  It still wasn't far from The Old Town and it was near the castle.  We agreed and got shuttled over to the new place.  After we got situated we take off to walk around and explore.  Only had 2 days in Prague and we needed to see the sights.  We first head to the Charles Bridge which is a pedestrian only bridge and there are lots of vendors selling various things they've made as well as artists drawing portraits of people.  

Next thing we just wander around and get lost in the old town.  This is when we did a little souvenir shopping and I bought some postcards.  Mom popped her head into a few jewelery shops to gaze at some garnet earrings that she was trying to find to match a ring she has.  At 7:30 we were headed to make our way over to a meeting point for a brewery pub tour that we had read about.  It was around 30 US per person and included dinner and drinks at 5 different pubs.  We race to the meeting point and as we stroll up from a distance we can see who's crowded around the tour guide.  About 5 older gents with bellies.  After a quick huddle, mom and I decided to blow that off!  

The meeting point was in a cool part of town though called Wenceslas Square and it kinda reminded me of a mini Champs Elysees in Paris.

Now to the portion of the blog you know I wouldn't miss...FOOD.  We had only had the sandwiches earlier on the train so it was feeding time.  We opted for some traditional Czech food this evening.  The waitstaff was very friendly and even better is that they had pictures of each of the dishes that you were ordering.  I got some type of pork dish with mashed potatoes and spinach in  them, and I honestly can't remember what mom got.  We both started off with a soup, I got a chicken noodle-y soup and mom got a potato soup.  It was dark when we finished and we headed on the walk back to our hotel.

On our walk we discovered the castle that was lit up on the hill.  It really was gorgeous and the pictures don't do it much justice.

After taking about 100 pics of the castle, trying to get the lighting just right, we settle for what we have on the camera and take it on back to the Roma.  We ask the front desk guy where we could grab some ice cream and he points us in the direction of the Charles Bridge.  It was rather late so finding something still open would have been a miracle.  Of course we don't find an ice cream joint so we just go into a restaurant and get some dessert. Lucky for me they had ice cream and I got one scoop of vanilla and 1 scoop of strawberry.  Mom got a panna cotta.

Day 2 in Prague we decide to go check out the castle and that was just a mess in and of itself.  We kept looking for the damn castle and come to find out we were actually already inside the walls of it!  We were thinking more of an old school stone palace is what we were looking for but it was more of what I would call a palace.  Okay so we decide not to go into this so called "castle" and venture over to the Jewish quarter instead. But not before checking out the  HUGE Saint Vitus Cathedral that was located inside the walls of the castle.  Apparently my grandma used to have a saying about "don't go all crazy and do the St. Vitus dance."  I need to look into that saying and figure out what that means!

So onward to the Jewish district.  We were told they had a really awesome cemetary (if cemetaries can be awesome?) so we wanted to see for ourselves.  I don't know what it is about walking around cemetaries but I think it's pretty cool.  I really enjoyed walking around the Pere Lachaise in Paris.  All the gravestones at the one here in Prague were of course in Hebrew.  And ever so often you would see little pieces of paper or pebbles on top of the tombstone.  People apparently write down wishes and put them there.  We were also told there were some 12,000 people buried in the cemetary and in  like 15 layers deep!  Here are a few pics.

Oh and I forgot to add a pic of the view of the city from up near the castle!

After the Jewish quarter we decided to venture over to the Astronomical clock.  Mom had read that at the top of the hour things pop out of it and dance around, etc.  We were about 30 minutes from the time this was supposed to go down so we grabbed a table at a nearby cafe and got a warm drink to waste sometime, and I filled out a few postcards.  Once the clock hit the hour we saw the clock do it's thing and it was pretty neat.  This little skeleton rang a bell and I thought that was pretty neat.  I tried to video it from my camera at first, but then I couldn't really see it very good so I tossed out that idea. 

And here is the town hall building (I believe), which is what is so neat about Prague because all the buildings are so old and have a gothic feel to them!

It was pretty late in the afternoon by now so we wanted to grab some dinner and try out this Czech-Mex place that was near our hotel and it also had awesome reviews written about it.  I'm never one to shy away from Mexican food so we tried it out.  Holy Moly it was delicious!  We got some nachos as an appetizer and mom and I both got 2 different kinds of enchiladas.  Mine were cheese and hers were chicken I think.  I cleaned my plate but mom had a few leftovers!  After our full belly we decided to check out this Thai foot massage place we had been eyeing the past few days.  It was connected to our hotel and we had a discount card in our room since we were guests at the hotel.  Along with the foot massage you also got massaged on your arms, hands, legs, and neck.  Wowzers, they should have called this the Thai Torture massage!  I really think these ladies were trying to test our pain threshold!  Mom and I both agreed that we were more sore coming out of the massage rather than going in, haha! After the painful massage we walked around for a little something sweet to eat and got a couple truffles.  Oh and I finally happened upon that kolache I was looking for!

EuroTrip...Berlin, Germany

So mom and I land in Berlin at approximately 11:00pm.  We sat next to a sweet German girl that was flying by herself.  She must not fly very often because she was a bit shaken up.  The plane ride was a little bumpy, but definitely not the worst I've ever encountered.  She spoke pretty good English so I tried to comfort her and talk to her to keep her mind off the ride.  Once we landed we went through immigration and customs and the guy didn't want to give me a stamp!  He said because I have a French visa that it was not necessary for me to have a stamp.  Me being the saleswoman that I am, ended up talking him into going ahead and giving me a stamp.  Hey I've got a passport to fill up, don't try to interfere mister!

Mom had arranged for a transfer to pick us up and take us to our hotel.  This was a fantastic option as we were arriving late and didn't want to brave the public transport.  It took us about 30 minutes to get to the hotel and to our surprise it was a Holiday Inn!  A huge step up from that damn hostel we had been staying in the past 3 nights.  Kudos to mom!  The only downfall was that the hotel was quite far from the main center of town, Alexanderplatz. After finally checking in and dropping our luggage off in the room we were quite hungry as we hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast earlier that morning.  Downfall?  It was midnight!  We went down to the front desk and they tell us that the hotel restaurant is already closed and that the nearest thing that would be open was either Burger King or McDonalds, both of which we were trying to avoid.  On top of that, both of these were about a 15 to 20 minute walk on foot and we weren't exactly sure where we were going.  So the next option was to raid the vending machine with the few coins we had left.  I opted for a bag of Lays bbq chips and mom had a granola bar.  I had all of 1 of those chips and just gave up.  I'm not a big bbq flavor fan and I figured if I just went to sleep the hunger would go away, so I did just that.

Next morning was time for our Fat Tour bike tour.  My very last in the series of 4!  We got to the meeting point a tad early and since we hadn't had any food for almost 24 hrs. we grabbed a quick snack before hopping on the bikes.  Mom got a brautwurst and I got some meatballs in a "mexican" sauce with peppers and corn.  It tasted like heaven, or maybe it was because I forgot what food tasted like.  The meeting point for the tour was outside of the main entrance to the TV tower and it wasn't hard to miss as there was a giant crowd gathered round.  By far the biggest tour group I have seen so far.  There were so many of us we had to be split into 4 different groups, and each group had around 20 people in them!  Our guide was Tam and he was and English guy who had been giving the tours for about a year.  He was also later outed by a couple of the other tour guides as having his masters from Cambridge University, one smart cookie he was!  Of course we go to most of the major sites and lots of other lesser known sites that I won't bore you with.  Here are a few highlights in pictures!

This first picture is a statue (obviously) of both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles in a memorial that celebrates communism. 

The famous TV Tower (East Berlin).  When it's sunny outside the sun shines on the metal and forms what looks like a cross.  West Berliners laughed at this and called it the Pope's Revenge.  The government spent thousands trying to change the surface of the outside and never succeeded.

This next picture looks just like glass with a few shadows of people in it, but if you look closely you can see what appears to be a bookshelves.  This is a memorial in the square where one of the famous Nazi book burnings took place.  The empty bookshelves is to commemorate this event.

Above is the famous or infamous, should I say, Checkpoint Charlie which was a crossing point through the Berlin was from West Germany and East Germany during the Cold War.

Here we are folks, a piece of the Berlin wall that is still standing, but obviously not in use.  Ironically, so many people were taking bits and pieces of the wall for souvenirs that there is now a wall (or fence) that surrounds the Berlin Wall!

This is a watch tower and I believe the only one that still remains in East Berlin.  Two soldiers would be on the lookout in the tower for anyone that was trying to escape over the wall into West Berlin.

Brandenburg Gate in the background.  Several embassies are in this same vicinity including the US, Sweden, Italy, and France.  Finally it was time for our little lunch break and we were stopping off at a traditional German Bier Garten!  This place was packed and it may have had something to do with the most amazing weather outside.  We were so lucky to finally get a break from all the rain.  As you can see in the above picture I had short sleeves on!  Even the guides were recommending sunscreen be put on before the tour!

They already had a pre set menu for us to choose from and mom and I both chose the same thing which was Potato Soup with sausage. Which we later found out looked and tasted more like cut up hot dog weenies.  But the soup was yum and the beer was even better.  We both each had one and then split another.  After lunch mom started looking for her car keys, haha.  Good thing we were on bikes!  We finished up with the tour soon after lunch, only hitting a few more stops.  I of course collected my free tee since I had done all 4 of the Fat Tire Bike Tours!  We asked one of the guys that was working there where we could get some good ice cream so we went walking around afterwards in search of a sweet treat.  We also happened upon a mobile brautwurst girl that we thought was the most hilarious thing!

Did a little souvenir and post card shopping next.  I believe mom gorged on a 3000 calorie mocha frappuccino and some sort of pastry.  After the long bike ride and walking around town, we took it back to the hotel for a "short" nap, before getting back out that night.  Cue 10:30pm and we finally wake from the dead!  We straight passed out and since it was so late, clearly we didn't get back out.  Thankfully the hotel restaurant was open this time.  I got a toasted ham and cheese baguette and mom got and awesome cheese plate, and they weren't stingy with the cheese!  We even brought a little of the leftovers back to the room in case we wanted to snack later.

The next day marked our last full day in Berlin, somehow we managed to sleep in although we had that super long nap the night before.  We had heard about a Schloss (palace) that was over in West Berlin so we decided to go check that out.  First we went into Alexanderplatz to grab a quick bite.  Geez, maybe this is more like a food blog,  I just realized! Anyway, we both got a braut and beer!

Now onwards to the Schloss!  Isn't that a fun word to say?  My mom and I kept using it in various sentences just for fun.  I didn't get any pics from inside the Schloss because they were being strict and had people watching your every move, and don't think I didn't try, but I was just paranoid and ended up giving up.  The outside was quite nice though and there were some beautiful gardens in the back.

Next we rode the subway back into town and got off near the area where a bunch of retail stores were.  In mom's travel book it said this was one of the places not to miss.  It wasn't anything to spectacular but we did run across somewhat of a religious parade that was going down the streets.  People were singing, they were carrying a cross, and this girl was swinging something that had smoke coming out of it.

And of course we couldn't leave Berlin without having gone up the TV tower.  I wanted to wait until night to go up, because I always think things look beautiful lit up.  Thankfully the line wasn't very crowded and we only had to wait about 10 minutes.  There was a bar and a restaurant at the top, neither of which we bought anything at.  We circled a couple times and tried to take a few pictures.

By this time it had been awhile since we had our braut's so of course it was feeding time for the little piglets.  Mom suggested a Thai restaurant she had heard about so we made our way over there.  We both had a curry chicken soup and then we shared a pork dish that was plenty enough.  The fun part was still to come as we had to make our way back to our hotel in the boonies via public transportation. This would normally be no big deal, but it was quite late at this point (almost midnight) and trams and subways don't run as often as they do during the day.  The term "The Freaks Come Out At Night" described our journey home to the T!  The German youth are a whole other breed and I wouldn't be wrong in saying that black is their favorite color...and leather, boy do they like black leather!  I really would have liked to have gotten a picture of some of the people we encountered but I was afraid I would get caught and get a clunky Dr. Marten boot up my ass!  After a few turnarounds on the subway we finally get to our last tram stop where all we need to do is hop on and ride a few blocks down to be right out in front of our hotel.  Welp, the next one wasn't coming for another 28 minutes!  And unlike the previous day's gorgeous weather it was super cold.  I finally talked my mom into grabbing a cab for the few blocks and she agreed, hallelujah.  The next morning was gonna be an early one.  Had a train to catch down to Prague for our final leg of the trip!

EuroTrip...London, England

Mom and I have an early 7 am wake up call the next morning to hit up our second leg of the trip which is London, England.  Neither of us have ever been to London and we are excited about being in a country where we actually speak the language!  We take the tram to the train station and then from there hop on a train that takes you out to the airport.  We tried buying tickets for the train at an outside kiosk but that proved to be a total mix-up.  We bought discounted tickets, not the right ones, and the list goes on.  Finally we get that situation under control and we are on the train in to time.  The airport was easy to navigate and the Easy Jet line to check in was outrageously long.  However since we are smart cookies we had already checked in online and Easy Jet has a special line for people that just need to drop off their checked luggage!  This saved us a lot of time and we ended up doing a little duty free shopping at the Schipol airport.  So what did we buy?  Liquor of course, or I guess you could refer to it more as liqueur.  They had a special where you could buy any 2 bottles of Bailey's for 29 Euro so we bought 1 bottle of regular and 1 bottle of caramel flavor.

The flight over to London was easy breezy.  Our plane landed at a smaller airport a little outside the city at London Luton.  It was simple though to catch a bus over to the train station and then from there it was a short 30 minute ride to the main station in London at St. Pancras.  From there we were able to walk to our place of stay for the next three nights...The Generator Hostel!  Yes people we actually stayed at a hostel for this leg of the trip.  We were trying to stay in budget friendly accommodation and a decent area of town so this is what we came up with.  London is not a cheap city so The Generator it was.  Thankfully we did have our our room with our own beds, bunk beds that is.  I got stuck on the top bunk and mom was on the bottom bunk.  The beds were a little janky in the fact that mom couldn't sit up in her bed without banging her head from the above bunk.  They were pretty comfortable however.  There was a sink in the room but the toilet was down the hall and the showers were either on the floor above ours or below.  The ones on our floor were currently being renovated.  We were also lucky enough to have a room over looking a little ally that was designated both the "quiet zone" and also doubled as the smokers area.  Anyway, more on the hostel later.

We got to the hostel before check in time so we dropped our luggage in the luggage room (a complete and utter mess) and then we went to find some lunch.  Just ate at a little sandwich shop near the hostel and went and bought our London underground tickets for the next few days.  We also stopped off at an internet cafe to check some e-mail's and facebook of course.  Basically just wasting a little time till the clock hit 2:00.  Finally we were able to get in the room and then we could head out to explore London Town!  Our first stop was the famous Harrods department store.  The store is owned by the father of Dodi Al Fayed who was the man that was dating Princess Diana when they were both killed in the car accident in Paris.  One of my mom's co-workers wanted a Harrods bag so that was our main reason for going.  They have really famous food halls as well, with the most decadent chocolates, prime cuts of meat, seafood, cheese and the list could go on.  We ran across some Turkish Delight that tempted us.  Everyone remembers the book The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and how the kids just loved Turkish Delight. So being a kid at heart, I too had to try the little sweet treat.  So my thoughts, meh.  Nothing special, it tasted like the candied orange slices you can get back in the states.  Here are a few pics of the food halls and Harrods.

The last pic is me with my little slice of Turkish Delight.  So we walked up and down the giant department store.  They have a really ridiculous area called Animal Kingdom where everything is devoted to pets.  Whether it's gourmet food, blinged out dog chains and collars, or pet clothes, they had it!

After we left Harrods it started raining on us (surprise surprise) so we stopped off in a little coffeehouse (not the same as in Amsterdam!) to re-group and figure out where we wanted to go next.  We had worked up a little appetite so we decided to go around to the Piccadilly Circus area because we knew there would be a lot of food options on that side of town.  I would sum up the Piccadilly area like a mini Times Square in New York.  Several big billboards that were lit up and tourist shops.  We stopped into one and bought some magnets and trinkets for our friends and then went on the food hunt.  Mom had read in one of her many books about a Ramen Noodle type restaurant where that was their specialty and we actually happened upon during our hunt!  We of course go in and have dinner there that night.  I go a giant bowl of Ramen that had beef in it with hot peppers and cilantro!  I believe mom got some type of noodle dish. AND I had Peach Ice Tea for my drink! 

We took it back to the Generator after dinner so we could get some rest before our Fat Tire bike tour around the city the next morning.  Mom laid down right away and I went downstairs to the common area so I could get online and update this here blog.  Around 1:00am the fire alarm sounds all of a sudden.  Knowing the age range of the clientele staying at the hostel, I automatically figured it was a false alarm and some young punk had probably pulled the alarm on purpose.  After about 30 seconds it went off and no smoke was visible so my assumptions were right.  Other than hearing chatter outside our window all night, we did manage to finally drift off and get some shut eye before our bike tour the next day.

So here we are on Tuesday, March 23rd, our second day in London.  The meeting time for our bike tour is 11:00 am and we met outside one of the underground stations near their shop.  It was a small group of 7 and our tour guide Matt, who is a native Londoner.  We hop on our bikes and off we go with the first stop at Kensington Palace and Kensington Gardens.

This palace was a little bit underwhelming if you ask me.  When I think of where the Royal Family lives, it's a lot more glitz and glamour than this place!  Next stop was the Arch (seems like every city has one) that was dedicated to The Duke of Wellington...at least I think, so don't quote me on this!

Supposedly you can go to the top of the arch and actually see the backyard of Buckingham Palace and what's over the giant wall that surrounds it.  Maybe we'll check that out on the next trip.  Which leads us to the 3rd stop of Buckingham Palace.  You can see it in the background.

At this point in our journey it was time to have some lunch and we just went to a little sandwich place called Pret A Manger that I had eaten at once before when I was in Edinburgh.  It was located in Trafalgar Square which was a very busy part of the city and loaded with history.

Of course no tour of London would be complete without a stop at Westminster Abbey.  It looks strikingly similar to Notre Dame here in Paris, actually.

One of the highlights I enjoyed was also seeing the famous guards out in front of Buckingham Palace with their big bear skin hats! But they weren't wearing red which was kinda a disappointment.

The last few stops were that of memorials for Princess Diana and  also one more but I can't remember who it was for.  It started raining on us at the Princess Diana memorial but to be honest it wouldn't be a day in London if it hadn't rained!  Once we the tour was over and we dropped our bikes off at the shop, we asked our guide Matt and his boss David what we should do next.  They pointed us in the direction of Portobello street for their quirky shops and street market.  It was also in the Notting Hill area as well.  That was the cutest little street and they had a great cupcake shop called Hummingbird where I snagged one of my favorite sweet treats.

After walking around for quite some time and making one of our notorious coffee shop breaks to figure out our next game plan we worked up an appetite and decided on Fish and Chips and a little bar/restaurant called Sun and Splendour.  We just shared a plate and each had a beer.  We then walked towards the metro but made several stops into some cute little cheapo clothing stores.  I bought another pair of jeggings and mom didn't get anything.  And back to the hostel we went.

The next morning we slept in a bit and decided to hit up the rest of the tourist stuff that we didn't get to see on our bike ride.  First stop was the London Eye which is the giant ferris wheel looking thing that a lot of people recognize.  We first had lunch and then walked over to it.  Seriously that thing moves at a snail's pace!  You can barely tell it's even moving, the whole time mom and I thought it was shut down. 

We crossed over the River Thames so we could get a closer look at Big Ben and we contemplated going inside Westminster Abbey as well.

After we venture over to the Abbey and realized they wanted some ridiculous price to enter (if you weren't worshiping that is) we blew that notion off and opted to go check out the Saint Paul's Cathedral where Princess Diana and Charles got married.  Of course we arrive exactly at the same time they were not letting anymore visitors inside!  Just our luck! We caught the outside however and that was good enough for us.   the lazy bums that we are, we went back to the hostel and took a small nap before our Jack the Ripper walking tour started at 7:30.  The tour consisted of a guide taking us around to the various sights where the 5 women were murdered by Jack the Ripper during the 1800's.  Our guide was rather corny but knowledgeable and fun.  It lasted a couple hours and we were done by 9:30...just in time to book it over to NOBU for dinner.  That's right ladies and gents, mom and I are now among the Hollywood Elite to have dined at the famous restaurant.  I'll have to admit, it wasn't as special as I thought it would be.  I thought their specialty was sushi, but come to find out they just served all the basic rolls and no specialty ones.  We came to the conclusion that what is so delicious, must be the cooked food.  That was our final night in London before we continued to Berlin for our 3rd leg of the trip.  Our flight out of Gatwick wasn't until late afternoon the next day so we still had a half day to explore any last few things before we left the island.  The one last thing that we hadn't previously checked out that I wanted to was the Tower Bridge which is in most of the postcards you see.  A lot of people think it's actually the London Bridge but it's not!

Afterwards we took a short train ride out to Gatwick to find out our flight to Berlin had been delayed for 2 hours!  Then we found out it wasn't and rushed through security to catch the plane and then were told again that indeed it was delayed! Bought a travel book on Italy for my upcoming journey there and mom journaled a tad while we waited.  At last our plane arrived and we were off to Berlin! 

EuroTrip...Amsterdam, The Netherlands

My mom arrived on Friday the 19th here in Paris.  Once we got her things situated and dropped off at my apartment we went straight over to the Sacre Coeur to walk around inside the basilica.  I had already done this when my friend Lauren was here visiting me but she didn't get to the last time she was in Paris.  After we did that we walked around my neighborhood and bought a few souvenirs to take back to her friends at work.  I also got my friend Andrea a couple gifts as well.  Oh and I forgot to mention we had lunch at the Italian place down from my apartment called Pulcinella.  I got the tortellini with the truffle cream sauce and my mom got something kinda similar.  The cooks were heavy on the salt that day and anyone that knows me, knows I love salt!  Okay so back to the day...we had on the agenda to do the Fat Tire night bike tour that started at 6:00 so we stopped off for a beer at the Cafe Ziem and then got ready to book it over to the meeting spot.  The bike ride was a ton of fun.  It started off drizzling right when we pulled off but no big deal.  The night bike was a lot more biking and not as much talk, which is what I kinda prefer.  We were weaving in and out of the busy streets in the rain and it was just an awesome experience.  Don't have any pictures from it as we were using my mom's camera more and plus most of the places we stopped off, I had already been to and gotten pics of.  About an hour and a half into the bike ride we stopped off to get an ice cream and it was yum.  I got a caramel butter flavor and can't remember what mom got but I remember mine being better.  The rain started picking up a little heavier and I had a few complications with my bike as the chain kept coming off but one of the guides was able to fix it right away.  Another highlight was that we got to take a little cruise on a Seine River Boat.  We parked all our bikes and loaded up on the boat.  The guides brought along several bottles of wine for us to drink and we got up close views of the Eiffel Tower at night and when it sparkled at the top of the hour.  Once we got through with the tour we came straight back to my part of town since it was really late.  We grabbed a kebab for dinner and went to sleep as we had to catch an early morning train to Amsterdam from Gare du Nord.

The train station was a bit chaotic since a couple of the escalators weren't working and we had to lug our suitcases up the stairs and they were HEAVY.  Then we waited for them to post our platform number.  Getting on the train and finding our seats was pretty easy and we were off in no time.  We took a high speed train and the trip was only around 3 hours.  Being the internet junkie that I am, I was able to purchase some wifi and blog a little on the train.  Finally we were only 1 stop away from reaching Amsterdam and our train stops in a dark tunnel.  They come on the loud speaker and explain that there is something wrong with the train and it would be about 25 minutes.  Immediately after the conductor got off the loud speaker we hear a LOUD BOOM!  Several of us look around at each other with a worried look in our eyes.  Was that normal?  Was that a bomb?  Then about 10 minutes later we hear it again!  At this point I'm a little freaked about but finally our train started moving and all was okay.

Once we got to Amsterdam we knew we had to take a tram to get out to our little hotel.  We find a tourist information area and mom gets our tram pass for the next couple days.  We get on the tram and ride that sucker forever!  We were a little outside of the main areas but still just a few tram stops away.  We stayed at a quaint little 2 star place called Hotel Wilhelmina.  Our room had a little tv that played 1 English channel, Animal Planet!  Wow, I just decided from that last sentence I'm going into way too much detail!  Since we got to Amsterdam around early afternoon we hook it back into town and hit up the Heineken Brewery first.

I made mom be the guy, haha!

After the brewery it was onwards to the Anne Frank House.  They stayed open pretty late and from one of the travel books mom picked up they said to go around 6:30 in the evening because the line wasn't as long.  We weren't allowed to take pictures in the house but it was really neat.  It made you feel like you were the the time period when the family was hiding out.  I believe they were there for a little over 2 years before they were ratted out by someone and all sent to concentration camps.  Below is a picture of the outside of the house.

After the Anne Frank house we decided to switch it up all together and head to an entirely different type of museum.  The Sex Museum!  Whoa what a weird bunch of stuff!  Here are a few pics taken from inside, they are somewhat comical.

Somehow after the Sex Museum we were hungry, so we decided to eat at an Indonesian restaurant and have a "rice table" that mom had read about in one of her books.  Way too much food! We ate as much as we could and had to stop.  It was getting late after dinner and we headed back to our little bungalow and hit the sack.  The next day we were to do a bike tour and some more sightseeing.  We slept in the next day and went downstairs and grabbed a little free breakfast that was included in the price of the room.  It was less than stellar but the orange juice was decent.  We walked around town for most of the early afternoon and then caught the bike tour.  Since Fat Tire didn't have a branch in Amsterdam we went through Mikes Bike Tours and I would recommend taking this to anyone that visits the city.  The Dutch know how to ride a bike and Mike is very knowledgeable on all things about the city!  

This above is a picture of the Amstel River and around 10,000 bicycles are pulled from this river every year!

If you look closely you can see that some of the buildings in the background are actually a little crooked and are leaning sideways!

One of the many "coffeeshops" you can find in Amsterdam.  We didn't go into this particular one, but we did step inside one just to see what it was all about.  No purchases were made though, perhaps on another trip without ol' mom!

After the bike ride we took our guides advice and hit up the Pancake Company for dinner.  These weren't normal pancakes as you could get ones with meat, cheese, etc. inside them.  They were similar to a crepe.  Mom got The Hungarian and I got The Mexican and I really preferred her's over mind.  We should have share just one to be honest because they were giant and neither of us could finish ours.  Afterwards we went into a coffeeshop just to use the internet.  We were told they had computers with internet access and since our 2 star didn't offer wifi so I could get on my laptop, this was our excuse to step inside an Amsterdam coffeeshop!  Next we just headed back to the hotel since it was getting late. We had an early wake up call to get out to the airport for our next leg of the exciting EuroTrip!