Hamburg-Paris

I wake up early. Again. My sleeping pattern is so screwed up. It's a little frustrating to be on holiday and continuously wake at four am because you know that when you get home all of a sudden you will want to sleep until eight! Argh!

We repack our bags - after a week of living out of the car this is no mean feet. Both of our bags weigh in at over nineteen kg's - the limit is twenty. Whew. So stoked that the weight allowance on our next flight is thirty kg's each and can be split over two bags! Morning traffics snags us in its frustrating web and adds another half an hour or so to our drive time, fortunately we always allow plenty of time to check in so once again we find ourselves leaping through the normal airport hoops with time to spare. My new favourite game is being told just before boarding that my small handbag is counted as my hand luggage and that if I want it on board I will have to pay to check my actual hand luggage... Sorry, what? I open my actual hand luggage and put my handbag inside - this is apparently fine. Unfortunately this doesn't work for a lot of the women in the line. They lose the game and have to pay to have their bags checked. The thing that really bugs me is that duty free and laptop bags are excluded from this rule. Why? Most of the hand bags are smaller than either of those, usually lighter as well - why are you targeting women EasyJet? It should be one rule for all. So happy to not have to help line your pockets for a while, you bunch of sexist, thieving wankers.

Moving on.

We fly into Paris, there's no customs or anything which is really bizarre to me and our bags are some of the first out. The metro ticket system from the airport was really confusing, we still don't know if we rode illegally but everyone was fairly unhelpful. It takes two hours to make our way through the system to our hotel and then we drag our bags up six flights of very narrow, steep, spiral stairs. The stairs are so worn that they actually resemble a slide. I am totally going to fall up or down it during our stay. Our room is very small, smells weird, and I hope to god there are no bedbugs, but we made it! The last stop, and the last hotel for the trip! 

After collapsing from exhaustion for long enough to discover that the wifi is less than good, we haul ourselves up and head back down to the street. I have managed to lose both of the maps that I grabbed at the airport (what a tool), so we weave through the narrow streets hoping to find another. We get pretty lost but we luck out and find one of the larger metro stations where we are able to get our hands on another map. I give this one to Willy.

We have dinner at a little Thai place. It's very, very nice. I have a chicken shrimp noodle salad thing and it's that perfect level of hot that makes your nose run. I gave Willy some too, so we both sit in this nice restaurant dressed like backpackers with our noses dripping. I never said it was a romantic dinner, no wonder the very nice staff sat us at the back. 

On the way home we grab a few supplies (chocolate, beer, and mentos are all necessary supplies at this stage) and trudge our way back up those horrid stairs.