Onto Amsterdam

April 6, 2010

Today was our travel day so we decided to sleep in and take our time. The train to Amsterdam left every hour and we didn't have to be there until 8pm to meet our next host. I ended up sleeping in until a little before 11 and Hilary woke up around 11:30. We got ready, packed up and headed out of the house around 2. It was a very slow morning. At this point we realized we were running a little low on time so we started to hurry along. We dropped Estelle's keys off with her at her work and said goodbye. :( Then headed to the station to get our tickets validated. After this we had about 40 minutes until the train came and Hilary wanted to go run an errand to get a friend a present. Since time was short I stayed at the station to watch the bags and she ran to get the present. While waiting I got one last waffle and some cash for Amsterdam. Hilary came back pretty quickly and we went to the platform.

At this point we were about to get on a semi-long train and hadn't had a great breakfast so Hilary ran back upstairs to get some fries for us to have on the train. Well the train was arriving at 15:22 and Hilary ran down the stairs with fries in hand at 15:20:30. Talk about close timing, she was making me really nervous. This train wasn't as full as the Bruges one so Hilary and I got a section of four seats together so we could sprawl out.

We got comfortable and pulled out our fries to eat the deliciousness. Then I saw the conductor coming down the aisle to check tickets. This reminded me that we hadn't filled out the dates on our Eurail pass yet so I got that out. Well as I was filling it out the conductor walks up to me and says "To late." Uhh, what? Turns out Hilary and I were both dumb enough to not read our Eurail tickets and know that we were supposed to fill everything out first else our tickets aren't valid and we have to pay for the train ride. Luckily, we pulled off our dumb girl routine of not knowing what we were doing and hopefully the conductor can enlighten us and let us off the hook. It worked pretty well this time and the conductor filled things in for us and didn't make us pay (probably cause we looked so clueless) but he didn't seem very happy about it.

Other than that the trip went really smoothly and the weather was gorgeous outside so we had some great views of the countryside. We pulled in to Amsterdam on time and headed out to the ferry lines to meet up with our host oh the north side of the water a little outside of the city. We found the ferry easy enough and ended up at the meeting spot an hour earlier than we thought so we went to a cafe, had some drinks and then went back to meet our host at 8.

Our host was Arthur who answered a last minute add for us when we were having troubles finding a place. He was awesome and picked us up with a car to drive to his house which was about a 15-20 minutes drive. We dropped our stuff of at his place then headed to the grocery store to buy dinner. Hilary was in charge since we wanted to make dinner for Arthur and me in the kitchen and/or with food and any sort of responsibility or know how is laughable. We decided to make chicken, vegetables and rice. Once we got back to the apartment we started on the meal. Hilary told me what to do and I did it and then watched her actually do the real cooking. It was great. I enjoy cooking when I'm going ordered around in the kitchen. Makes me feel useful, ha. The dinner was so-so. There weren't too many spices to work with but all in all in the cheap good food so I have no complaints. Next came the dessert. Oh my goodness. Amazing ice cream. I don't even know why it was so good other than assuming it was made with real cream, but the closest I've had to this is gelato in Italy and that is saying something.

Arthur was great to talk to. He has a lot of opinions and isn't afraid to express them which is refreshing. We talked a lot about Holland and the police and justice system. No one really respects the police over here according to Arthur which is sort of a problem. The system doesn't seem like the best but I guess everyone has their complaints with every system. Arthur also said there isn't a death penalty here and a lot of people get off with fairly short prison sentences. It was unbelievable how easy going the justice system seemed here.

We also found out that Arthur didn't have a very good view of American couchsurfers. He'd had two bad experiences in the past and no good ones so we were a little sad to hear that. We're hoping we were able to change his minds about American CSers through our experience. I asked him if we had and he said "Yes, very much. You girls are funny." Hopefully that's a good thing! :)