Paris/Amsterdam trip - March 14 & 15

The free breakfast at the hotel was glorious!  So good we snuck Yoli and Z in to have it :)  They had a traditional English breakfast, fruit, a bunch of pastries, breads and croissants, cereal, cured meats, cheese (fancy ones!), coffee, espresso...and the stewed tomatoes was one of the best things I've ever put in my mouth.  I ate breakfast super early after finishing up on the Internet, then went back to sleep...we all slept until 10am, and we missed the 11am New Paris free walking tour.  This pretty much threw our whole day off.  We got to the site where the tour meets, hoping to catch Yoli and Z...all we saw was what appeared to be the tour group, off in the distance.  So we walk-ran to catch up, and after fifteen sweaty minutes gave up.  We took the 1pm tour instead, and it was great.  History in snack form.

It was a Sunday so pretty much everything was closed.  We tried to find an H&M (which the French call, "ach emm") but nada.  Or, rien.  We headed back to the hotel; I got a ton of smokes at a tabac nearby and we got dinner and a couple six packs of French Beer, 1664 and something else, at the grocery store.  We hung out in the hotel, drinking and eating, and slept like babies.

The next day we determinedly got up via wake-up call and went to the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, where Jim Morrison is buried.  We saw his grave and I got a new Facebook profile picture; I don't know which of the two is more important.  We then headed over to a French Flea Market, Marche aux Puces de Saint-Ouen, which was a total bust.  The affordable part resembled Hialeah, and the rest was an expensive antiques market.  More metro trips led us to the Moulin Rouge, which we weakly photographed and then got back onto the Metro.  God, we used the hell out of that metro card.  Definitely a good value.

Tired.  Tired.  Taking pictures of outsides was all we could manage, being tired and cheap.  We went to a lot of places in Paris, just not in them.  At least we were all in agreement that, that was the way to go.

Wendy had a boot mishap and Mata was suffering in her shoes so we went to the mall to get sneakers for the two of them.  There we saw an Ach Emm but it was a bust, extremely picked over and busy.  I got nuthin', and shock waves ran through the earth as a result.

We ate dinner at a French Friday's called Hippopotamus (Hippo, if you're down like that).  Apparently well-done meat is unheard of in France.  There was a blood bath on Mata's plate by the time she was finished, and Wendy had to send hers back...not that it came back any more cooked, just more charred on the outside.  It's as if they cook with blow torches.

We began our love affair with frite sauce in Paris and it continued through to Amsterdam.  It's either mayo, or flavored mayo, that you eat with fries, and it was the thing to do in both places.  If you want to know how this tastes, just come by any of our homes for a bit of authentic frite sauce we bought in Amsterdam and yes, carried all the way home.