Amsterdam-it

Well as many of you know I’ve had an eventful past two weeks! Last week we were traveling around as a group following the path of Luther. We also got to see Dresden and Berlin. Berlin was awesome but we didn’t get to see as much as I wish we could have. We then went to Wittenberg, Eisenach, Erfurt, and Heidelberg. They were all fairly interesting cities, but we were pumped to get on our travel week. I was off to Amsterdam with the two other guys and one girl. Then began our saga of failure. And oh man was it full of failures.

            First of all we got to the hostel in Heidelberg and asked if they had the tickets that I had mailed to them in advance so I could pick them up there. Well when we got there we asked if they had the tickets, and they told us that they received them all right. But that they sent them back. So...we went to the train station and found out that returned tickets are automatically canceled. So we had to buy new tickets, for a price 36 euros more than our previous price. Bummer.  Well the next morning we got on a train to Mannheim, then found out that our connecting train was cancelled due to a fire on the track. Whatever that means. So we had to take a train to Frankfurt and then made our way to Köln (or Cologne for all you English folks). Finally we got to Köln and walked outside to see the Cathedral that is directly outside the train station. 

Its world-famous and all, but I still like the Dom St. Peter here in Regensburg better. Well…that little walk was unfortunate. We checked our tickets and found out that the train we thought was leaving at 3:42 actually left at 2:41…and our train had arrived at 2:38, so we may not have gotten the train in the first place. So we missed our second train of the day. We found a train heading to Amsterdam Centraal at 5:30 and thus waited in Köln for a few hours and ate some Burger King 1 euro hamburgers. The train ride there was just fine. We got into Amsterdam around 10 and liked the city on our first impression. We had some walking directions to our hostel and started following them. Sadly they were horrible directions and we ended up walking through the middle of the Coffeeshop district and Red Light Areas. It was a fast and harsh introduction to the world of Amsterdam. We promptly got lost and walked around Amsterdam for about an hour and a half. We asked directions from these two middle-aged men who were speaking English. One of the guys, who lived there, hadn’t ever heard of our street address. Then almost a block down the road the guy chased us down and showed us a different road name, but it was the right one. He pointed off in a direction and said that was where our hostel was. We started walking that way, but since the canals in Amsterdam are circular, we basically got way thrown off. We were debating where to go and this guy randomly walked up. His name was Thierry Baudet and he said that he would take us to our hostel because he was a writer who needed inspiration, so why not help some random tourists. It turns out that this guy is a writer for a magazine that is distributed to the top 10,000 politicians and policy makers of the Netherlands Government. He writes conservative economic columns that focus on the abolishment of the EU. It was extremely interesting to me as I need to write a paper later this semester on the views of Europeans and the EU. Very cool. He was a very nice dude and told us that he had been voted the “vainest man in Amsterdam” the day before by a local paper. Quite funny. We googled him later and he was the second option after Thierry Henry, the world famous soccer player. Yeah…apparently he’s a big deal. So we were escorted to our hostel by a local celebrity.

Getting to the hostel was only the tip of the adventure of fail. We got to the reception desk, gave them my name and our reservation number. They then proceeded to tell us that we had booked a hostel for the next two nights…but not Saturday night. This happened because we booked the hostel far in advance and the train tickets last week…not a good thing for future reference. We also found out that we couldn’t find a bed in the entire city because of the Amsterdam Marathon that was happening the next day. Apparently it’s a big deal. So we were told that we could sleep in the Centraal and be vagabonds. We resigned ourselves to sleeping in the train station, assuming it would be cool with the authorities and that it was open 24 hours. That was not the case on either point. We found a place to sit, were moved along by the floor cleaner. He pointed us to another area of the station that was thankfully warmer. We saw other sleeping there and thought that this was the acceptable area to sleep. WRONGO. The security people came through at 1:45am and told us the train station was closing, we asked for help and she said that Burger King upstairs was open until 4am and they might let us chill in there if we buy something. We went up there, but their dining room was closed. So instead we bought a coffee and sat on the platform out front. It was freezing and we were all packing on the layers. We stayed on that platform until 5am. It was ridiculous. I stood up for 95% of the time to stay warm and none of us got much sleep. I had a cool God moment at like 4am, which was cool. In the morning we went to Starbucks in the train station and sat out front for 2 more hours. The security people came around every 10 or so minutes and woke up anyone who was sleeping. It was really quite annoying and odd that they would care this much about people sleeping in the train station. We left the train station in favor of a two-story burger king that had free internet, free bathrooms, and was warm. We stayed there for a few hours and then felt that we had to leave after they kept shooting us dirty looks. We walked over to the area of where our hostel was and found a park. Naps in the sun in the park was one of the highlights of the trip for me. We checked into our hostel at 1:30pm and we slept. It was glorious. That night we walked around and chilled. It was good. 

The next day we decided that we wanted to go to Paris a day early and leave on Tuesday. The problem with that plan was that Paris decided to go all French on us and the Transportation workers in the country went on strike. Its still going on and Paris is currently the scene of riots. All over the changing of retirement benefits at age 62 instead of 60. So we booked tickets to come back to Germany. They cost far too much, but we were over it. We got our ICE train back to Köln and found out that the train we were on went all the way to Mannheim via Frankfurt. We decided to take naps, and, if we missed Köln, then we got closer to our destination. We were woken up by people who had reserved our seats and thus started a 12 hour trip back to Regensburg. We bought regional tickets for the four regions that we were going to be going through. Then we started out journey. We caught a train to Koblenz, then we went to Frankfurt. Our train was delayed then for 15 minutes which made us miss our connection. We waited an hour for the next train and were on our way. We made it uneventfully to Nürnberg where we again were late for our train to Regensburg. Then we waited an hour for the next train. When that train came the sign said that it was a train going to Neumarkt (random city in Bavaria) at the same time that it was going to Regensburg. We didn’t get on it, assuming that since our train was below the other one on the sign ours was waiting to come right after the other one. Sadly when this train pulled away we saw Regensburg Hbf on the back sign…meaning that the train was going to split at Neumarkt. So after some chagrined words we found another train going to Regensburg in half an hour. Finally we made the train and got back to Regensburg at 10:50pm. Thus ends the saga of the Amsterdam-it trip. It was a character building trip for sure and we gained a greater appreciation for Bavaria and Germany in general. It’s a beautiful and great place!