April 16
This was so long ago, I hardly remember how the day began, but I’m pretty sure I packed the night before (for once) and then woke up and skipped gaily to the train station, where I was to meet Katie and hop gaily on the bus to Milan Malpensa, from which we would jet gaily to Amsterdam. Spoiler alert: the day was even gayer than we anticipated, but unfortunately less in the Pleasantville way and more in the spirit of the immature descriptive.
Met Katie at Porta Susa, where I bought a brioche (Nutella, of course) and water, and where we were accosted by a possibly-homeless, possibly-senile old man who very much wanted some coins from us, to no avail. Eventually the bus came and we got on. I remember being quite tired, which I assume means I stayed up late the night before (OH YEAH, I was only finishing a 10-page paper on Ayatollah Khomeini as well as writing a group paper for international affairs; I’m quite certain I was up until 4 a.m.). So I slept on the bus, and woke up upon our arrival to Milan, with a spring in my step and a song in my heart (this one).
Walked into the airport, which seemed to be operating as usual (FALSE, they probably had automatons pretending to be doing their jobs, because I can assure you there was no actual assistance being provided to anyone), and walked up to the Departure (Partenze) screens to see what gate we had to go to. I saw a flight to Amsterdam that had been canceled, and panicked minorly before noticing that I was looking at the wrong flight…phew. Scanned the screen to find the correct flight, found it…balls. ANNULLATO. My flight was canceled too.
Perhaps now is the right time to explain what we all know, which is that the godforsaken Icelandic volcano (I don’t have Internet right now, so I can’t look it up, although if we’re going to guess, I think it’s spelled Eyjfjakyojkyull…we’ll find out later how close I was [okay this is it: Eyjafjallajökul--NOT TOO SHABBY, KATHLEEN]) had erupted, for the first time in 200 years. Obviously this was an unprecedented incident for the airlines, since planes didn’t exist in 1821 or whatever, although I still feel that they should have already had an emergency plan in place for an incident such as this. Surely they had to realize that at some point a remote, only sporadically active volcano would erupt for probably two years, spewing ludicrous amounts of ash into the air and paralyzing an entire continent’s flight systems for almost a week…RIGHT?
But they didn’t, because they are incompetent fools, and even more incompetently, they had failed to email me and let me know that my flight was canceled. Let’s put this into perspective: for my flight to Sicily two weeks prior, they had emailed me the night before to let me know that my flight had been moved to TEN MINUTES later. An entire continent shuts down and nary an email? That is shenanigans, easyJet, and I hope you are reading this.
We headed to the check-in counter to find out what we were supposed to do, only to be given a phone number and told to call easyJet’s helpline…at the cost of 1.50 Euros a minute. Since Italian phones work by adding credit to them every time you need to, I had about 10 Euros in credit on my phone. I called easyJet since I didn’t have another option, and talked to someone who told me there were seats on the next day’s flight. As soon as I went to say that I was interested in accepting those seats, my phone promptly ran out of credit and I lost the seats. COOL. We went back to the counter and were told to try their website instead…only the easyJet terminal DOESN’T HAVE Internet, so we were ushered to Terminal 1, which was a 10-minute shuttle bus ride away. We had the genius idea to use Skype to call them instead of sending an email that almost certainly wouldn’t receive a response. They told us the Internet was available in the business lounge, so we wandered the terminal for 15 minutes trying to find said lounge…stumbled into it and were told that Internet was actually everywhere in the airport, and that it cost 10 Euros to access it…(in case it wasn’t clear, my ellipses usually express disbelief or disapproval; you will see many of them in my description of April 16).
We begged to just use the receptionist’s computer or phone and were rebuffed, so we went outside and sat down to Skype easyJet—not. My Skype credit wouldn’t let me call their number, so we checked easyJet’s website and found a page that said that if our flight is canceled, we’re entitled to free phone calls, meals, etc. So we hopped on the shuttle bus and trundled back to Terminal 2. Back to the counter, and had a conversation that went something along the lines of, “WTF give me my phone call, you Nazi phone bitch.” It didn’t work. We were curtly advised to give up and head to Milan Centrale to see if there was a train to Amsterdam (not that online investigation had let us know that trains took 15 hours and cost 500 Euros or anything…). Got back on the shuttle bus for a THIRD time and grabbed a bus from the airport to the train station. At that point, it was pouring rain, because God was shedding tears that I wasn’t making it to my dream city, and our options were to either take a train to Amsterdam, wait in Milan for a flight the next day, or simply give up and go home.
Decided to go to Milan and just check out the train situation, even though it seemed pretty apparent that it was going to be way too expensive to take the train. Got there and the train station was a MADHOUSE. The entire station was full of people in one, giant line, trying to get out of Milan (sorry, Milan); we joined an outside line (you know, in the rain) and stood there for the next hour until we got to the front and found out it was 200 Euros JUST to get to Frankfurt, so we declined and instead stood there sullenly before coming to terms with the fact that we were NOT going to Amsterdam that day.
☹ ☹ ☹
[April 17-April 23: Period of sullenness; see next blog for further detail]
Saturday, April 24
First of all, I’d like to say that just detailing that experience was both depressing and exhausting…I barely even have the motivation to tell you about Amsterdam now. HOWEVER, I don’t want to forget anything that happened (any more than I already have, I mean; my notoriously bad memory seems to have served me even worse in Amsterdam), so I guess I can suck it up and get back to the trip (FINALLY).
I had chosen the earliest flight to Amsterdam on Saturday so that I would have as much time as possible in the city, meaning that I would once again have to catch a 3 a.m. bus to Milan, so I once again stayed up all night rather than just get 2 or 3 hours of pointless sleep. Also, I had to repack. So I did that, got in the taxi to get to the bus, and was grilled by the taxi driver—had I bought my bus ticket beforehand? I hadn’t, which apparently worried him greatly, since last week he’d had a passenger who tried to take the bus only to find it full, and he’d had to drive the person all the way to Milan…so I was like umm no I should be fine, but internally I started freaking out—was it FATE that I never make it to Amsterdam? However, I got there and the stupid taxi driver had made me nervous for nothing, because there were tons of seats left; he was nice about it, though, and even held the taxi without charging me extra so I could find out about tickets before he left, so yeah that was nice.
Uneventful bus ride, although the bus driver told me not to sleep with my feet on the seats which I WASN’T doing, but okay, sir. Made it to Milan, got through security, waited a while, got on the plane, FINALLY MADE IT TO AMSTERDAM; the whole thing was the best kind of uneventful. At this point, I took a train from the airport to Amsterdam proper and then headed to the venerable Hostel Cosmos to meet up with Anthony and Ryan (oh, I guess I should mention that since Katie had already booked a trip for Barcelona that weekend, she couldn’t come to Amsterdam on the backup weekend, so instead I met up with two other USACers who had already gotten there two days earlier).
Got to the hostel quite easily, settled in a bit, the boys gave me an extra wristband they’d gotten from the Heineken Museum, which saved me the trouble of going there myself. It turned out that Amsterdam was kind of really famous for their coffee, so I went with the boys to experience my first Amsterdam coffee, some kind of power brew according to the barista. Luckily, I have finally started liking coffee in the past few years and I was very impressed with this one, which kept me satisfied for a good few hours.
Then we went to go get lunch, since I hadn’t eaten in about a million days; actually, the boys got Asian wok, while I (already trying to save money) settled on a nutritionally deficient pack of stroopwafels. The stroopwafel is an interesting delicacy to describe. Imagine the stuff they use to make waffle cones, but flattened and circular (two of those), with delicious, gooey caramel sandwiched between them. For 1.29 Euros, you could get a pack of TWELVE stroopwafels, and I literally ate almost nothing but stroops for the next four days.
We then explored the famed Red Light District, walking past very many classy-looking hookers and souvenir shops. Also walked around for about a million hours trying to find the (I am)sterdam sign, but eventually found it and took the requisite pictures with it. Then wandered around some more, taking pictures in something green that may or may not have been the garden of a museum and/or church. Then we got some more coffee and drank it at the Vondelpark, one of Amsterdam’s biggest parks, which was really pretty. Sat in the sun for a while and absorbed our surroundings. Possibly we ate after this, although if we did, I didn’t take any photos of it (I’m writing this blog based on the progression of photos I took…so if I didn’t take a photo of it, I guarantee you I don’t remember it, and the event has been lost into the ether forever).
Then we got another coffee at one of Amsterdam’s very first cafés, sitting in a window seat and watching tourists pass by. We also saw a man jog by in the Borat green thong bathing suit; he was fun. After exiting the café, we saw the outside of the Oude Kerk (old church); I’m not sure if it was open to visitors, since we didn’t even attempt to go inside it, but it was very nice on the outside. In one of the main squares, Dam Square, there was a carnival going on with lots of fun rides. Since it was freaking expensive, we just decided to ride one (which still cost us 5 Euros), which was incredibly scary since we were all buzzed from coffee but it was very much fun, since I love carnivals and scary rides and all things unladylike.
Afterwards, we either drank another coffee and then ate, or ate and then drank coffee; either way, we ate Burger King, but you shouldn’t judge us because frankly it was an entire meal for 2 Euros, and since we seemed to be spending our life savings on coffee, it felt like the practical thing to do. Then, we kept walking around for SO LONG, stopped briefly at a café possibly, kept walking and ended up in a bar that seemed nice and manly (aka lots of oak furnishings and it looked kinda like a saloon) so we ordered some Heinekens and sat down. Then we looked around noticed that it was a gay bar, populated mainly by men that were old enough to be DILFs, only they probably didn’t have kids. I was quite amused, since I like the gays a lot and it hadn’t occurred to me that gay bars existed in Amsterdam (God knows why, I mean sometimes I just don’t think about these things in advance, you know?). Anyway, the guys were decidedly less amused (LAME), so we left and started looking for some other friends, but at that point I was SO TIRED (ironic, really, considering how much coffee we drank), so I gave up and went home, while Anthony and Ryan stayed out (I know, I’m lame, these things can’t be helped).
Sunday, April 25
We began the day with coffee! (Anyone surprised?) Then we went to go get what was basically brunch (if you can call Burger King and Subway brunch). Walked around and saw some fun Amsterdam sights, including the Condomerie, which is basically self-explanatory. Went back to one of the same cafés from yesterday, before passing by a canal and seeing about a million boats (it seems that Sunday is boating day in the ‘Dam), so we watched those for a while before moving on to walk around some more. There are TONS of bikes in Amsterdam, since it’s the main mode of transportation, and I noticed that there were a lot of people riding bikes, with friends riding on the back sidesaddle, which I feel probably isn’t overly common, so I took some photos, but the girl I photographed got inordinately upset and flipped me off which isn’t the Dutch way (or at least shouldn’t be), so I definitely took umbrage. Bitch. Then we found a nice looking canal, so we sat down and settled in for a while to boat-watch. The boats were SO COOL; they all had their own personalities, which sounds weird and a little anthropomorphize-y, but I promise you this was the case (there were twee hipster boats, tough army boats, etc); we also saw a most impressive ginger. So we watched for about a million years, until we were feeling a little drowsy and figured some more coffee couldn’t hurt.
Amsterdam/the Netherlands is famous for their fries that they make, served in a cone and usually with mayonnaise, so I got a cone of chips with ketchup and garlic mayonnaise that was SO GOOD mmm. Then after that, we went to the Red Light District again, just because it’s impossible to walk through Amsterdam without traversing the area. Since it was nighttime at this point, they actually had the red lights above their windows turned on and it seemed like a good photo opportunity…so I made a grave mistake and took a picture. They all FREAKED OUT and started screaming at me and swearing at me, even ones who weren’t featured in the photo. Walked around a bit more, and had one last coffee with the guys before they left for the airport (since they’d gotten there two days earlier, they were also leaving two days earlier).
Monday, April 26
Woke upski and had a morning coffee before heading out to a free walking tour (thanks, New Amsterdam!). There were so many people that they had us split up so that there were three separate tours—a sprightly young Irish woman named Joyce led mine. I want to say she was a well-informed, engaging tour guide...at least I can say she was well-informed. Unfortunately, she wasn’t quite charismatic enough, even though she was very nice and generally knew what she was talking about. She told us she was a new tour guide, so that might account for her general awkwardness. Anyway, she showed us around the city and we saw some fun stuff. A giant statue of a head, although I don’t know whose head. A church in the middle of the Red Light District, because sailors used to come ashore in Amsterdam and bone all those hookers, but then they would repent, so the Church had a conveniently placed church where they could confess and pay indulgences and basically absolve themselves of their sins (although probably not of the syphilis, unfortunately). We saw a tulip garden, which was nice, although honestly I thought they’d be way more prevalent than they were. We passed by some buildings where squatters live; apparently in Amsterdam they are very bold and they paint the outsides of the building since they’re mostly artists and stuff, and that’s how you know squatters live there, which frankly defeats the purpose of squatting, in my opinion, but there you have it. At some point, I got bored and had to have another coffee to make it through the rest of the tour, but I definitely can’t complain because it was free and I still got to see a lot of Amsterdam that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen.
After the tour was over, I got directions to the Anne Frank House and moseyed on over there, but I definitely didn’t go inside, because it costs 10 Euros and my friend had been previously and told me that instead of letting you in to see the attic, they just put up a giant mirror that reflected the image of the attic without really letting anyone explore the actual house. I was therefore entirely uninterested, so I just took photos in front of it and left. I was actually a little surprised by the location of the house; maybe it’s been a while since I’ve read the book, but I didn’t know the house was on the edge of a canal (I guess it figures) and overlooking the water and a bridge. I think it sort of humanized it, imagining her looking out of the attic onto water and boats and people. So it seems as if I basically can still appreciate Anne Frank even if I don’t pay the cost of five Burger King meals to see a reflection of her empty attic.
Following that, I went to a pancake house that my roommates had told me I should definitely visit in Amsterdam. Unfortunately, I went to the wrong one, but I still had some bomb-ass bacon pancakes, so that was good. It was also possibly my only legitimate meal of the trip…a pancake. Then I popped into a record store and saw a ton of cool records, but they were sadly too big for my backpack, so instead I found somewhere else to spend my money and went and did a bit of souvenir shopping. After that, it was time for another coffee break, where I ate some apple pie and wrote my postcards (which I still haven’t sent a week later) before dinner (guess where…). By that time, it was about 10 already if you can believe it, which felt to me like the perfect time to go to sleep. I swear to God, they must lace that coffee with Ambien, because I definitely passed out until the next morning…sort of.
Tuesday, April 27
My phone died that day, meaning that I had no alarm clock to wake me up at 6 a.m.…those of us who are aware of my sleep habits know this to be very worrying. I was so worried that I wouldn’t wake up, in fact, that I slept incredibly restlessly and by 5:30, I couldn’t handle the pressure of waking myself up at the right time and just got going for the day. I walked to the train station and had one last coffee while I looked at the view from one of the canals at SUNRISE (how romantic is my life), and then I hopped on the train to the airport. At the airport, I realized I was starving and so headed to a little express food thing, where they had, of all things SAUSAGE ROLLS BEING SERVED. So, despite it being about 8 in the morning, I bought the damn sausage roll and ate it and ENJOYED IT. God, it was so good, even now I am salivating over it. I got through security and sat down at my gate, conveniently finding myself next to an American couple and another American man…they proceeded to loudly have a conversation about a bunch of bullshit things that made me realize why people hate Americans. It was so obnoxious I had to just pass out until it was time to board. Flight was fine, and then it was back to the bus, where I spent my last 20 Euros (literally, I had saved my last 20 to pay for the bus ride, leaving me officially broke from the trip) and made my way back to Porta Susa, from which I headed home and then directly into school to catch the end of one of my classes (don’t worry, I missed it anyway). Thanks a lot, Amsterdam. No really, THANK YOU—Amsterdam was one of my favorite cities ever, which I don’t often say. I’m definitely planning on returning as soon as I can. This is all I have to say about Amsterdam now; maybe my pictures can tell you the rest. More blog catching up coming soon! Ciaooo xoxo
outside the AF house
proof, however anticlimactic, that i was there
some really subtle squatters
sunrise at amsterdam centraal
THE SAUSAGE ROLL
one of my superartistic tulip shots
the photo that almost ended my life
café b-dog
vondelpark
(i am)sterdam
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