Amsterdam Overtime

Welcome back! This letter is an accounting of my time in Amsterdam, both the good and the bad. Let’s get right into it.

The weekend of July 26th was a great one to travel - we had Friday off of class, a class that had just started that week, so there were no real stakes or deadlines yet. A group of friends and I (the squad from UF I mentioned in my last letter) planned a trip to Amsterdam. It had all the makings of a classic study abroad trip - cheap tickets, random accommodations, last-minute plans, the works.

Thursday

The trip actually began on Thursday night, where we found ourselves at the Berlin central station waiting for a sleeper train. I was feeling slightly apprehensive at the trip, seeing as I never sleep well on vehicles of any kind. My hesitance grew as the train actually pulled into the station, as the cars looked pretty run-down and old. The price of my ticket was showing.

Everyone in my group had booked their tickets on their own, so we were all scattered through the train. I headed to my car and slid open the door, feeling like I was in a Walmart Hogwarts Express. I sat down in my seat and waited to the train to leave. A few minutes went by and I thought I might have the compartment to myself, but three other guys my age joined me in the next quarter hour.

The first had long hair and an accent I couldn’t place. The next was British with a buzz cut and many miscellaneous bags, and the fourth was tall and alternatively dressed. They were all nice, and we all had a decent amount of room, as the compartment we were in was meant for six occupants.

After we left the station, we set up the compartment for beds and we all climbed into our respective bunks. I spent the next seven hours in sort of a half-sleep - I never felt as if I fell asleep and woke up, but the gaps of time that passed between checking my watch seemed too large for me to have not slipped into a nap.

Friday

We arrived in Amsterdam at right around six-thirty in the morning. We got off the train, bleary-eyed, and did a quick head count to make sure everyone had woken up (we had, despite one close call). We set out for our hostel, not to check in, but just to drop off our bags.

Given the early hour, the city was quiet and rather cold. We were a bit dismayed to see trash all over the streets, though we later learned that this wasn’t typical for the city. A big windstorm had just passed through and knocked over trashcans around the area, a problem exacerbated by the birds scavenging for anything they could get their beaks on.

We dropped our bags off at our hostel and set out to find something that was open at such an hour. We eventually found a breakfast place, Mortimer, that had room for our group. I got a full English breakfast, which wasn’t very Dutch of me, but it was very good.

After eating, we walked over to a nearby park and strolled down a canal that ran through the area, one of the city’s many. We were mostly just killing time, but the park was nice and so was the weather. These three geese were following us around the whole time, and they were grouped up like a mafia boss and his two henchmen, which was funny to see.

Once we had had our fill of meandering, we walked back to the central part of the city to tour the Royal Palace, which was super cool. The interior is Greek mythology themed in many of the rooms, which awakened the latent Percy Jackson fan within me. All of the decor was created in a way to depict Amsterdam as the center of the universe - a hub of trade, commerce, and wealth, as it was at the time the palace was built (though it was a parliament at first, it only became a palace when Amsterdam came under occupation of the French in 1808).

The palace was interesting to see because much of it is still original, and it’s still in use today. It’s used for state receptions and other events put on by the Dutch royal family. After spending so much time in Germany, where almost everything is a replica or rebuild (most historic buildings got destroyed during WWII), it was cool to walk in an original place. The student discount didn’t hurt either.

After the tour, we got some cookies from a place called Van Stapele, a bakery that only sells one type of cookie - chocolate with chocolate chips and a vanilla cream in the center. They were delicious, if not a bit expensive. We got lunch after at a sandwich shop that was equally tasty.

The next big event was a tour of the original Heineken beer brewery, which was a lot more engaging than I was expecting it to be. We learned how their beer is made, saw the old vats where it used to be brewed, and were told the massive scale at which they produce beer. They produce seven hundred seventy thousand bottles and cans every hour across their many breweries around the world. That’s a lot of beer - enough for each resident in the city of Tracy to have a little over a hundred sixty eight beers a day.

The tour also included an experience where we were ‘bottled,’ so we could truly understand what goes into making a Heineken beer. This involved standing a room where screens covering the ceiling and walls played a very cool montage showing the bottling process. The rumbling floor and cinematic soundtrack made the whole thing feel akin to an amusement park ride. Once we had been bottled, we headed down to the bar for complementary beer that came with our tickets.

Our tour included two tokens that we could exchange for beers at the end of the tour, and we did so, but for some reason people kept handing us their tokens too, so we got much more beer than we paid for. We also got to try pouring beers ourselves (I was actually pretty good at it, for whatever reason), which was fun.

After we drank our fill, we went back to our hostel to check in. There were seven guys I was traveling with, so we got put in a eight person room with one other guy. He was nice but a very interesting character. He had been living in the hostel for the last month and seemingly didn’t have any plans to leave. Apparently he’s also married and had cheated on his wife - not sure why he told us that.

Dinner was underwhelming - we had planned to go to a Michelin recommended Asian place, but it was full and we ended up at a touristy Italian place that was not good. The gelato we got after dinner was worth it though.

Saturday

Saturday was busy - we did a walking tour first thing in the morning that was great! Our guide was very engaging and informative and I learned lots of cool things about the city:

• Many houses in Amsterdam lean to the left or right. This is because back in the day, their foundations were built on wooden stilts that rotted over the years, so the houses lost support. This has since been addressed by using metal stilts, but the leaning can’t really be undone. The most famous ones are called ‘The Dancing Houses.’
• Other houses lean forward, but this is intentional. This allows large items to be hoisted up into the house via the furniture hook near the roof without banging into the walls/windows.
• Another reason for the trash I mentioned above - Amsterdam is trying out a bottle return system like Germany, where you pay a deposit and can get it back, but the machines that do it don’t work very well yet. This means that many people just toss them into the trash and then scavengers empty out the trash to try and get some money from bottles they find.
• The East India Shipping Company, which handled the vast amount of commerce in Amsterdam during the the 17th century, would have been worth seven trillion dollars if it still existed today. This is roughly the same as the combined GDPs of Germany and Japan.

After the tour, we grabbed some croquettes for lunch (highly recommend those) and wandered around a shopping district. We also got some fresh stroopwaffels (highly recommend these even more). We took a quick pit stop at our hostel before getting Thai food for dinner, which was amazing - probably the best I’ve had.

We then met up with the rest of our groups at the docks near the Central Station for a boat tour down the canal - one with unlimited wine and cheese to boot. I didn’t pay for that upgrade, since I didn’t think it would be worth the extra fifteen euro, but they just said I could have it anyway because ‘it’s too much work for us to separate you guys.’ Win!

The tour on the canal was great - very peaceful and beautiful. The tour guide was also great, though many of the stories and things he shared with us were repeats from our walking tour. The craziest part was when he took a cup, scooped up some river water, and took a sip! Supposedly the river isn’t hazardous until the first rain of the year, when all the runoff from the streets contaminates the water, but it still didn’t look very clean. The fact that he wiped his hands off with a Clorox wipe after did little to convince me that it was safe. Hopefully he’s okay.

My group went to a bar after the tour finished and hung out with some drinks. Long day but a fun one!

Sunday

Sunday we had left open as a sort of ‘do whatever else you wanted while we’re here day.’ We got up in the morning and checked out of our hostel. Our friend from our room checked out too - I guess two nights with us was enough to convince him to leave. We started out by going to a bakery my girlfriend had recommended me that sold cookie croissants. They were so good, despite their seven euro price tag.

We then headed over to Vondelpark, which is sort of like the Central Park of Amsterdam. It was beautiful! We wandered around among the trees, bodies of water, and many people and animals. We took a pit stop near one of the ponds and relaxed in the grass for an hour or so. The weather was great and a few of us fell asleep on the soft lawn.

We only had a few hours before our flight home, so me and some of the guys in my group went to a Maritime museum that was pretty cool. They had a full size replica of an 18th century trading ship behind the museum that you could walk around on. It was setup like it would have been back in the day. My main takeaway from it was that I would have been much too tall to be a sailor - every ceiling had me crouched down or hunched over. There were also cool exhibits about the history of navigation instruments and how maps of the earth evolved over the years.

The EasyJet Fiasco

We all met up back at our hostel and headed over to the airport for our flight, which was scheduled for nine-thirty. Right as we left, it got delayed to ten-twenty, which was lame but we were already on our way. While we were on the train, we got another notice that our departure time had been pushed back to eleven. We, again, were upset but decided just to deal with it.

However, right as we got to the airport, our flight got cancelled entirely. We set out to find an agent from our airline, but turns out that EasyJet doesn’t have agents at the Amsterdam airport. We discussed options with a third-party ticket seller, but they were all either ridiculously expensive or extremely undesirable, like a ten hour bus ride back to Berlin.

We ended up just booking another flight through our airline, since they would cover the cost, but the next available trip wasn’t until the following morning. Luckily, the airline covered the cost of our hotel too. Me and three others in my group got on this flight, but then it filled up, so some other people we were with had to resort to another option. They were able to get a flight too, but because of how they booked it, they had to front the almost eight hundred dollar cost and wait for a reimbursement. Same with the hotel.

The hotel was super nice, though I wished I had just been able to get home. I gladly went to bed once we got checked in there.

Monday

Monday was one of the most ‘waste of time’ days I’ve ever had. We got up and headed to the airport for our flight, which was scheduled at 11:30. We got on board on time, but then once we were all in, the captain told us that air traffic control was delaying us on the ground for forty-five minutes. Luckily, the delay was exactly that long, and we took off.

Now, you might think that’s the end of it, but we were not actually flying to Berlin. I had a layover first, not in the Netherlands, not in Germany, but in Italy. That’s right, we flew almost directly south to the island of Sardinia in Italy, completely out of the way from Berlin. To make matters worse, our next flight back to Berlin wasn’t scheduled for another four hours.

After a long afternoon in the airport, we got on board our second flight and made it back to Berlin after more than eight hours of travel. Had our original flight happened, it would’ve been a quick ninety minute trip.

We took a train back from the airport to our apartment and I finally got to sleep in my own bed. It had been a long day. Amsterdam was fun though!

Moral of the story - do not fly with EasyJet. Things with them are more likely to be ExtremelyDifficultJet.

Thanks for reading! Talk to you guys again soon.