Esprit Saint Germain Paris

... the French are rightly proud of the capital.

It didn't cost us much at all during the week, we are pretty savy to most tourist traps in Europe now and it wasn't hard to find the cheap local shops tucked away from the main routes, our biggest expense was a two day museum pass at 30 euros each, but this is Europe Paul and Shaz style and we hammered all the major museums and sights on the card bringing each entry fee down from around 10 euros to about 3 euros for each ...

... promised beer pong tables, but we stayed anyways because they had some decent drink specials. Best part of the night was running into the Jonas Brothers. No, not the real ones, but three french guys who had decided that claiming to be them was a great way to get girls. Unfortunately for them I know what the real Jonas Brothers look like (did I really just publicly admit that?) and Edward was also more than willing to call them out ...

... Hugo had once lived. Old ladies with their little dogs , young couples, students, and families are walking around in the park. They look so elegant. Every single one of them, dressed in black with the most appropriate accessories... Paris is Paris. There are no stereotypes, it is the way you imagine it is.

... through, because my player started the move over on me. I decided to get some rest though, because it's a rather short red-eye and we were planning a big day. Travis, too, gave up on "Mirrors" and went to sleep. We woke up to breakfast of croissant, yogurt, and fruit, and then it was hit the ground running in Paris. After dropping our bags at the hotel (which let us check in a bit early!), we hit the Metro immediately and headed for the Ile de la Cite ...

... the old Louvre. It is a dimly lit path following the outside of the remaining ramparts. What I didn't realise until Matt showed me is that you can get inside to see the remains of the original tower. Sometimes it is handy having an ex-tour manager as a husband. With our museum tolerance starting to fade we decided to do a quick whip around of the "Big Three", the Mona Lisa, The Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo. Like the worst kind of tourists, we ...

... of the food packages. We picked up some yummy-looking pasta, I'll have to let you know how it is once we prepare it (if we can figure out how to do that). Once we returned, we unpacked and Steve watched a little TV. There are a few English channels, but it's more fun to watch the channels you can't understand. There were some American shows, overdubbed in French, which was pretty funny. Then we took a brief nap (2 hours) since we hadn't really slept on ...

... have to leave! Random thing that also happen that day was the crazy French stopped traffic on the round about around the Arc de Triomphe, flew in a helicopter and air lifted someone out. We have no idea who it was, but was very surreal to see a helicopter land on such a crazy busy round about right next to a huge historic monument. I took photos and video! Wednesday was more work and then the Moulin Rouge. So much fun, great to have a night out with the ...

... at 8am, we had been on the go for 13 hours) I stare out the window and count the kilometres down till we see Paris, and eventually we are struck with the excitement of arriving in a new town. We round a bend and there she is, the Eiffel Tower in all her glory. It was a breath of fresh air and also 10pm... We had booked a hotel in the Parisian suburb of Jourdain (no idea where it was) and 2 metro lines later and a lot of searching we ...

By Mandy If you had to pick a grand finale for a trip through Europe, Paris would be the way to go! We arrived in Paris early in the morning after a very crammed ride on the night train. We sat in reclining seats instead of a couchette (saving 16 Euros!). The city was dead at 8 a.m. on a foggy Sunday morning, but we quickly threw on our winter coats, stored our bags at the train station and hopped on the Metro to the Louvre to take advantage of the free day. We joined the line ...

Yesterday, we pretty much wandered around aimlessly. We did get down to rue Mouffetard (roughly translates as "mufftarded avenue"), which has a cool market. I didn't find anything, but Moe found the *cutest* shirt! We've officially left Paris, and now we're in Berlin. I haven't had a chance to soak any of Berlin up (except for this crazy keyboard, which is the same as English where the French was different, but is different in ...