Goedenavond, Amsterdam

After 3 planes and about 16 hours of travel, I arrived in Amsterdam exhausted with luggage and my former roommate Harvey in tow. The most stressful part of getting here was locating her in the Frankfurt Airport. We each paged the other a few times and finally met at one of the information desks about 50 minutes before our flight was scheduled to take off. Close call, but mid-day on a Tuesday has the place pretty empty. It only took us about 15 minutes to get from check in to gate, which is remarkable in my opinion.

The previous two flights (UA SFO-Heathrow and Lufthansa Heathrow-FRA) were pretty uneventful, although United was cramped, crowded, and long. I was able to nap a bit on all three flights, but not enough to really be rested. When we finally arrived at our hostel (The White Tulip in the Red Light district) I passed right out for about 5 hours. Harvey, already acclimated to the time change after spending the last month and a half in the Czech republic, decided to check out the neighborhood. She returned at 10:30, and dragged me out for a beer. Heineken and Grolsch the standard here, and are very good especially on tap. We sat outside for a bit and chatted with some Welsh travelers who had also arrived that day, and had only decided to come to Amsterdam a day or two before. After our beer, we headed back to the hostel - I was still tired, although in better shape than earlier.





What was kind of shocking at first was that this has been a lot easier than I anticipated. I was freaking out a bit the evening before my departure, but once I got on my plane at SFO, I felt pretty much ok. Amsterdam seems to be a good place to start out with for traveling overseas, as english is a second language to nearly every person to set foot in this country. The Dutch grow up with English spoken on television, and are pretty much automatically bilingual.