date: 2007-06-20 1:28
subject: Amsterdam
current-location: Atlas Hostel, Prague
tags: amsterdam, adventures, biking, sandcastles, sweetplaces

Amsterdam - 2007-06-20 1:28 - Entry 937 - TOGoS's Journal

We have arrived in Prague. This hostel makes free internets for you for free! So I use them. Also notepad. I have been working on this for a while and actually it is 1:01 in the morning now. If I really wanted I could do this all night and catch up completely...

2007-06-10 (Sunday)

It turns out breakfast at Hotel Gabriel isn't included in the price we paid for the rooms. Actually breakfast costs 10. a pop. So after all was said and done the bill for that place was 140. for our 2 nights (including the original 10. to reserve through hotelbookers). :(

Themes of Paris:

The trains to Amsterdam were exciting. First we stood around Gare du Nord for an hour trying to figure out how to 'validate' the tickets we had bought a couple days before. It turned out we just had to feed them to a little machine on the way onto the train. Then we got on our train to Flanders, dozing off a bit and looking at scenery. The train arrived at the station at 12:09, giving us no time at all to catch our 12:10 train to Berchem. We didn't really know what to do about missing our train, so we sat around and ate lunch. After talking to the info man several times we figured out that we needed to jump on another train that was leaving in 5 minutes.

On that train we met some folks from DC who were also lost and confused and had missed that same 12:10 train on their way to Amsterdam. They gave me a sudoku and I worked on it.

We had to transfer a few times, and that was always exciting. When we finally arrived in Amsterdam we had to figure out how to get to our hostel there. The info man told us to go to a 'kiosk', which turned out to be a food shop, not the ticket machines that we thought he meant when he said "kiosk", to get a 'Strippen Kaart'.

After getting to the hostel via tram we went across the street to Albert Heijn and bought food, brought it back to the hostel, and ate it while watching South Park (Part 2 of Cartman wants a Wii).

2007-06-11 (Monday)

I dreamt last night that I was still at Widen for another week. I didn't want to start anything new, so I started making a list of things that I thought they should get rid of to improve things. In the dream there was a whole pile of 'frameworks' (Java or otherwise) that they were using that added nothing at all and only got in the way and caused headaches. The way in which this dream differs from reality is that, in the dream, it was really easy to strip that stuff out.

This morning A-Day and I went to the train station to reserve a couple seats on a train to Berlin (9.5. for all that) on the 15th. I wrote a bit in my journal and apparently lost my pen. Then we went and rented bikes (13./day each, including theft insurance), and then went to an internet place that let us burn CDs for 7. per hour.

My pictures had funny numbers because I had switched memory cards between London and Paris. Somehow A-Day's numbers got an extra 10000 added. We think we have all our pictures backed up.

We came back to the hostel to have lunch and booked 4 nights in Berlin (92. total), and I found my pen clipped to my shirt (yay!)

2007-06-12 (Tuesday)

A-Day and I checked out the Dutch Resistance museum. We were going to check out Cannabis College but we couldn't find it. It was in the red light district and that place was scary so we got out of there without looking around much.

We came back and ate food. A-Day mostly wants to eat and sleep these days. I washed my clothes and later went for a bike ride supposedly west. I went through a nice park and saw a lot of birds and sweet places by the ponds, and also went a bit further to see which way to go to get to Haarlem. I think I may have had some success. I came back and e-mailed Mom and read about the cannabis college. I am writing without looking and it is making a mess in my journal.

2007-06-13 (Wednesday)

I've lately been copying 2 or 3 days of my journal entries into my LJ per day here. I probably won't be able to keep this up after we move on. This hostel is good for that because we have free internet here. (But don't use for more than 15 minutes if there are people waiting!) </ p >

Today A-Day and I got on our bikes and headed west. The idea was that the ocean was only about 10 miles away - We'd leave Amsterdam, bike through Haarlem, and pretty much be there.

We didn't really know how to leave Amsterdam westward, though. At first we followed the route that I had scouted out yesterday, but after that we ended up going south a lot more than we meant to, and had to wander back north (the bus maps helped a bit, though we usually had to guess where we were since they didn't have a 'you are here') until we finally found a nice straight path along the south of N200 going west.

That path took us to Haarlem, at which point we thought we were almost to the ocean. We went through Haarlem, along a road into the suburbs, through those suburbs (stopping at a supermarket to buy Jelly or water or something), out into the country again, across some railroad tracks where we got passed by a bunch of fast bikers, along some more roads, into another town, out of it again, and by some horses, mostly going southwest. The ocean didn't seem that far away on the map (should have been just on the other side of Haarlem) so we figured we must be going parallel to the shore, and no wonder we didn't seem to be making any progress.

So we turned towards the north and found another map that showed us exactly where the ocean was (just a bit northwest of where we were, across the obvious ridge that we had been watching the whole time).

We followed a bike path along the north side of the northwestern-most road we could find, and that bike path eventually split away from the road and went up into the hills. At first the place reminded us of northern wisconsin, as it had a lot of pine trees, but soon it got even cooler, and resembled nothing we had ever seen. There were sand dunes and pine trees and random little hills on top of bigger hills. There were a few forks in the path, and after choosing the ways we did we ended up at a little parking lot (a place to park your bikes), and an old couple with a dog, and one last ridge with a path over it.

Over the ridge we found the North Sea and a beach. I think the path we came out on was #22 (according to the sign near it). We walked along the beach and dug canals and jumped across to islands as the tide went out. We stopped to have lunch and fed our apple cores to seagulls. And then I took off my shoes and ran off to the water and started building walls and castles of sand. Seeing if I could build a pile of sand that the ocean wouldn't knock down. It was hard because once I finally got one up the tide would have gone out further. A-Day came over and helped with the walls. It was sweet.

Eventually we went home. It was a long ride and made my butt hurt. But we were less lost because there were always signs pointing to Amsterdam.

2007-06-14 (Thursday)

I am getting pretty tired. I think I will go to sleep now and next time write about a cool dream I had and our trip to Berlin. ~__~