I'm still so far behind

I'm going to have to backtrack quite a while to the beginning of February when I went to Amsterdam. Now, I realize this what quite some time ago so please don't judge me, but this will also be a rather quick post and then I can get to my extremely long vacation which will probably take me 5 hours to write a blog post about. So. I left off going to Madrid the last weekend in January. Karrah Castillo, Jake Wyffels (a guy in my program) and I had planned to go visit Amsterdam the first weekend in February. We bought our tickets and got ready to go and yada yada. I have the most supreme paranoia so when I was going to meet them at the bus stop to take the bus to the bus station (at 11 pm at night) I literally stood in this huge lighted area with my backpack on the front of me and it was just really a paranoid thing to do because their bus stop is off of this street called "Camino de Ronda" and its normally a REALLY busy street but unfortunately there is a ton of construction going on so no one is really over there anymore and thus it is scary. Anyway, I met them at the bus stop and we had to make it to the bus station to take a 12:30 am bus to Madrid because our flight was very early in the morning. The 5 hour early morning bus rides are not my favorite, and this was the first one I took. I hadn't been able to sleep much so that kind of sucked but oh well. So eventually we got to Madrid after a longggg 5 hours, and we had to wait for the metro to open at 6 am to take it all the way to Barajas. Little did I know that the metro trip would end up taking almost an hour to get there, but we were fine overall on time. We got to Barajas and checked in and went through security and hopped on our Iberia plane.

Now, I have taken Iberia a few times, including my group flight to Spain, but I wasn't expecting the extremely extremely cramped space that I would be sitting in. So, our plane was set to land in Amsterdam at about 11:30 am. I'm on the plane sleeping a bit, not worried at all. I wake up at about 11:00 thinking oh you know we should be landing soon. 5, 10 minutes pass, and nothing, no sign of us landing. 11:30 comes, and the pilot comes on the intercom and says we should be landing in about half an hour. I'm thinking, alright you know half an hour later than scheduled, not too big of a deal. However, you would think that we would kind of be descending into our destination and our ears would be popping, but rather it seemed to me and everyone else on the plane that we were just kind of chillin in the air. The pilot finally gets on the intercom and tells us we're going to have to land in Brussels because of the crazy winds in Amsterdam and only one runway being open. The intercom didn't really do the pilot justice, especially with his Spanish accent, so no one could really understand what he was saying. Basically though, it sounded to just about everyone on the plane that we had to find our own transportation from Brussels to Amsterdam. The two cities are close, but it would still be a three hour bus ride. Everyone, including myself, was freaking out at this point, and the Iberia staff wasn't really doing anything to answer any of our questions. I whip out my "LETS GO EUROPE" book (thanks Katie!) and I flipped through all of the pages to find Amsterdam transportation, and find a bus and train that go there. People in surrounding seats asked me if I had found something we could all take, and I looked at the map and tried to figure out the relative location incase we were forced to take a bus or something there. But, truthfully, if that was the case I would not have been a happy camper because I am pretty sure that wouldn't be legal to not bring us to the destination we paid for. Anyway, so we land in Brussels but not exactly what I would call a smooth landing, considering I thought I was going to die on the plane. We just kept going toward grass, no where near anything remotely resembling an airport. I kept saying "Are we seriously about to land in a field?" but luckily, we landed in the MOST remote area of the airport haha. The pilot then says "Well we don't know if it is going to be an hour or 3 hours before we are able to take off or what, so we will keep you guys on the plane until we know." The plane was extremely hot and uncomfortable, so that was fun. We all complained but then the airline gave us free water and then eventually we took off and got to Amsterdam at about 3 pm, a few hours later than planned.

We wandered around the airport and attempted to figure out how to get to central Amsterdam so we could make it to our hostel. Unfortunately a lot of the signs were in Dutch, so it was fun trying to figure it out. And, their train system is really strange and doesnt really have signs saying which train is which so we had to guess. And, we couldn't pay with cash which was really annoying.

ANYWAY, we eventually made it to downtown Amsterdam and had to wander around and try to figure out how to get to our hostel. I had written down directions but they weren't really that helpful, so we had to stop in a hotel and ask for a map and eventually asked how to get there. We finally got to our hostel, which was a Christian hostel in the middle of the red light district, so a slight contradiction I must say. We checked in and got our stuff ready and went to go explore the lovely city of Amsterdam.


It was pretty inevitable that we would walk through the Red Light District to go places and stuff, and I mean it is a tourist attraction so it was something we needed to see. It was very strange. Prostitution is legal there, so there were women in windows all through the few streets that were the red light district. We took a bunch of pictures and stuff of some beautiful churches and the buildings which are actually really really cool. Since we had gotten there later though, we didn't really have time to do that much, so we kind of walked around and explored and got some dinner and walked around some more and called it a night. The Red Light District at night was literally crazy. We walked through it to get back to our hostel and I kept saying that I felt like I was in a fun house because there were tons of people EVERYWHERE with a lot of bright signs and it was just kind of strange. A good experience for sure, but very odd.


The next morning we got up and went to the old Heineken factory for a tour. The actual brewery was moved outside the city, but it is a really cool set up and it was extremely interesting. They had all of the history of Heineken, how it is brewed and stuff, and then more modern stuff going on with their company. The cool thing was we got to taste the wort before it was turned into beer, so it was pretty cool to see that. After, we grabbed some lunch and went on a canal cruise. Amsterdam is famous for being built around TONS of different canals, so it was actually a beautiful city set up around all of these gorgeous canals. It took as all over and gave us some of the history of Amsterdam, so it was really really cool to see. Later, we went to the Anne Frank Huis. I had no idea before I went to Amsterdam that it was there, but I found out from some people when I was trying to figure out what to do there and stuff, and people recommended it. Luckily we bought tickets before, but the line was hugeeee, so we didn't have to wait. The house was done sooo well, it was really sad but really interesting to see at the same time. I hadn't known the entire story of everything, so it was really cool to see how the family was hiding in a big annex with another family, and find out what happened to all of them. Anne Frank's father actually lived and went back and eventually published her diary and set up the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam. It was very cool, and definitely my favorite part of Amsterdam.

Sorry, this was not so detailed because we didn't have tons of time to do stuff there, but I am moving on to blog about our super long trip because I have tons to talk about and little time to blog before I leave yet again!