After spending weeks driving around Iceland and a week spent in the frigid Greenlandic tundra, your girl was seriously ready for a city break. I wanted to shop, eat, drink and just generally enjoy the luxuries of a more urban landscape before beginning the journey back to Australia.

We started in Amsterdam.

Our first day in Amsterdam started with an obligatory frites stop. We had been thoroughly influenced by TkTok to check out Fabel Friet and to be honest, they did kind of live up to the hype – these fries were absolutely delish.

Next up was the Heineken Museum. Whilst I am truly a wine girly, I am married to a beer girly and thus a visit here was non negotiable. The museum is very cheesy but we had fun and Ella certainly enjoyed all the samples!

We also headed to the A’DAM Lookout and look, you can probably skip this one. The swing was fun but overpriced and the rest of the exhibits were pretty meh, although Ella climbing on the giant red horse was certainly entertaining for me.

After a side quest to buy my some shearling lined Birkenstock clogs, we headed to the Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum.

We were very nicely toasted (drunk) at this point – something you can probably tell from the pictures – lel.

The next day, nursing some rather gnarly hangovers, we boarded the express train from Amsterdam to Paris.

That evening we caught up on sleep as the next day would be a big day out celebrating Ella’s 34th birthday!

Ella had told me that all she wanted to do on her birthday was eat yummy food, go to a museum and if possible, do something a bit left of centre that in no way involved enclosed spaces (she could not have stressed enough how much she did not want to go near the catacombs).

We started our day with a few pastries and coffee at a boulangerie near our hotel before heading on to our first stop of the day – Musée de l’Orangerie.

We arrived to Musée de l’Orangerie and I was immediately reminded of why I like Paris – it truly is a magically beautiful city.

It definitely isn’t hard to see why Paris is known as the City of Love – I could not resist giving my beautiful wife many a smooch!

After a bit of view admiring and a lot of wife kissing, we headed on in to the museum. I had actually never been to this particular museum before (the last night I had properly visited Paris I was a uni student and was very much travelling on a uni students budget) and it was wonderful to admire art that was totally new to me, and also new to Ella.

We had a bit of time to kill before our next booking so we decided to take a stroll through the nearby Jardin des Tuileries, which was all kinds of gorgeous, but just make sure to be aware of your surroundings in this area, especially as your get closer to the Arc de Triomphe. There are lots of people around here running those classic survey scams – they’ll ask you to fill in a survey and while you’re distracted one of their accomplices will pickpocket you. Just stay on your guard and lean into your resting bitch face – lel.

Now, if you’ve spent even five minutes watching Paris related content on TikTok, chances are that you’ve been similarly influenced to visit Le Relais de l’Entrecote for their famous steak frites. This place pretty much exclusively serves steak and fries and they are good.

They don’t take bookings and thus I had us arrive about 30 minutes before they opened to minimise our wait times, this was a good call, by the time they opened the line had quadrupled in size!

These steak frites definitely lived up to the hype, the sauce was delicious and the fries were perfection. They offer second helpings of the fries and sauce which were absolutely taken advantage of.

After lunch we walked off some of the calories by strolling around for a while and taking in the views.

Now, you may recall that my lovely wife had requested that we do something ‘a bit left of centre with no enclosed spaces’. Finding something that is ‘off the beaten track’ in Paris is no easy feat, but after much googling I found just the thing.

The Musée des Arts Forains (Museum of Fairground Arts) is an extensive private collection of art related curiosities from the 19th and 20th centuries. It is located kind of in the middle of an otherwise suburban area, doesn’t look like much from the outside and tours are exclusively offered in French.

We most definitely do not speak French, so for English speakers – you are given a little booklet with written information so that you don’t just spend a few hours listening to French with no idea what is being said.

As it turns out, the tour guide assigned to our particular tour was an unbelievably nice guy who went out of his way to translate pretty much everything to English, despite Ella and I being the only two non French speakers on the entire tour, it was so ridiculously kind of him!

One of the main draw cards for us to visit this museum was how interactive it was. We didn’t just get to look at memorabilia, we got to experience them firsthand!

We got to ride on multiple old school carousels…

…and we even got to play a very vintage horse racing game which was so much fun.

One of the biggest attractions is the carousel in this next picture. If it looks in any way familiar, it will likely be because it was used in a scene from Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris. It was extra fun to ride because this one requires that punters actually pedal it to make it move, which also means that it has the capacity to go very fast, which of course, our group made it do.

We had so much fun on this tour – it was definitely left of centre and absolutely worth the schlep out to.

Our last meal in Paris was at Chez Janou – the food was delicious, the service was warm and welcoming and the decor was super cute.

Before too long it was time for us to leave Paris and head to our next destination. Luckily for us, I became obsessed with collecting frequent flier points before our trip, which meant that our long haul flights were suddenly so much more delightful – Emirates business class slaps ya’ll.

Thus our city break in Amsterdam and Paris had come to a close. It had been exactly what we wanted – we shopped to excess, drank to excess, ate to excess and just generally had fun.

It was perfect.

Stay tuned for a few days on an idyllic private island <3

THE LOWDOWN

Musée de l’Orangerie: Entrance to the museum will set you back 12,50€/$20 AUD/$14 USD, click here to learn more
Musée des Arts Forains: Entrance to the museum will set you back 18,80€/$30 AUD/$21 USD and it is well worth the money. Just remember, this tour is only offered in French with an English pamphlet, you may get lucky with an English translating guide on the day but this will come down to luck, click here to learn more
Le Relais de l’Entrecote: The steak frites truly do live up to the hype! Come early as no reservations are possible and enjoy leaving in a carbohydrate induced coma
Remember: Hungover train rides are brutal, plan accordingly