Hey girls!
Sooo happy to be home but we had a WONDERFUL time!
We were least looking forward to Venice but in the end we absolutely loved it. It was touristy as expected but enchanting and beautiful and like nothing we've ever seen before nonetheless. It was a shutterbug's dream and fantastic.
Rome was amazing too for different reason. The Italians are pretty intimidating and their fashion sense was pretty awesome. Dress shoes and leather jackets everywhere and you do stand out as a tourist if you come comfortable
The city was an open air museum though and everything from the Colosseum to the Forum and our food tour through the Trastevere neighborhood was breathtaking.
Barcelona was so amazing and easily one of our favorite cities. The vibe is wonderful, the city is beautiful, the people are warm and welcoming, the language barrier is easy going and charming to try to get around, the food is incredible... yeah, we just totally and completely fell in love with the city. I would go back to Barcelona in a heartbeat and would love to see more of Spain now.
The south of France was charming with it's small villages, open air markets and Roman monuments like Pont Du Gard and the arena in Nimes where we were staying. We loved the soap and the lavendar and browsing for cheese and fruit and sausage and crafts in the market at L'Isle Sur La Sorgue sooo much... but France in general didn't win our love. We enjoyed Provence more than Paris, but not as much as we loved the cities outside of France, but more on that later.
After that it was off to Amsterdam and all I can say on that is that I would move there in a heartbeat if it was realistic. We absolutely fell in love with everything about the city and just about cried when it was time to leave. The canals are beautiful, the people are wonderful and warm, the architecture is breathtaking and everything was perfect. We walked everywhere and WANTED too, we never got tired no matter how far we had walked because there was always something to see or a breezy and beautiful spot to sit and take it all in and yeah... seriously... just go if you haven't been!
Finally, we ended in Paris and compared to everything else it was such a let down and we just didn't get the hype. The eiffel tower is neat for about 10 minutes, Moulin Rouge is in a terrible area, the city is gigantic and not really friendly to walkers (we uber'd everywhere in paris and still ended walking forever), the shopping was mostly stuff you could get in the US or terrible TERRIBLE souvenirs, and the French people we encountered we're largely and with very few exceptions cold and very rude to us no matter how hard we tried in French to get off on the right foot.
We tried so hard to fall in love with Paris and find the spots and places that people love. We took our time and didn't try to rush place to place to place until we were run ragged because we honestly aren't "tourist trap" people so the HoHo bus and the Louvre and the Arc and so on and so forth weren't high on our list to jump all over the place to, but we just didn't get the charm or the appeal compared to Barcelona or Amsterdam which were soooooo amazing... so yeah, kind of a sour note to end on, but I think now we know and if we hadn't gone, we would have always wondered about Paris because it's one of "the world's greatest cities".
Happy to be home though and someday I look forward to going back to Europe because there is so much to envy about the European lifestyle which we truly love.
R