Delft to Paris

The last few days of my trip have been pretty hectic. Very little of what I planned to do happened.

My time in Amsterdam was good though. I visited the Anne Frank house and also the Van Gogh museum. I decided to skip out on Riksmuseum because despite being able to catch Rembrant´s Nightwatch, 2/3s of the library was closed and they still charged full admission. The only thing I didn´t really get to see was the red light zone while it was busy. I did catch it in the early morning (6-7am) but there were only two whores about. I saw a few more in a brothel that was isolated from the rest of the zone though. While I fully expected whores, porno theatres and the like, I was still surprised to see various advertisements with explicit photos.

I sat down for a beer and lunch with a large group of random dutchies. Really nice people but I think I was intruding a bit more than usual as these were a bunch of nursing/psychology students that were having spending some time with their mentors and celebrating a classmate´s birthday. They were still really nice and fun... one bought me a beer and I had a pretty indepth conversation with another guy - I can´t recall his name right now but I have his email and will contact him later and thank all of them for their hospitality.

Later in the evening, I talked to Rose and bolted to Delft, which is an hour south of Amsterdam. On the way, I met this Norwegian exchange student who was studying event management. She was quite nice and I found out she actually does some DJíng on the side by the stage name of Aglais. I´ll have to check out some of her stuff in the future.

Delft hosts the most impressive university campus I´ve seen from a "Oh my god, look at that gargantuan building" kinda way. The best way I could describe this one engineering building (before photos) is if you took all the buildings on the UBC campus and put them all into one, 10 story building. Rose´s residence was also ridiculously impressive... it looked like it belonged more on the yaletown waterfront than as a student residence. The architecture was tres chic with the grey oval building overhanging a large canal. She also lucked out and got the top floor with an amazing view of the sunset. Of course, still being a residence, it was falling quickly into disrepair.

The party at Rose´s for her b-day was a lot of fun. About half of the attendees were Iranian so it was nice to see how that culture celebrates. I also had some good laughs with some dutchies - they were going to be heading to China in a few months so they were exploiting some of my experiences. What I probably enjoyed most about the evening was how friendly and open everyone was. It was too bad that at house parties, dancing rarely happens but Rose, myself and a couple others put in a valiant effort.

I didn´t get much sleep that night and I had to get up at 6:30 to get ready to catch an 8am train to Brussels. The plan was to arrive around 10am, run around, eat some moules et frites, down some belgian beer and chocolates and hop on a train to Paris by about 3pm. Now, I really should´ve made a point to understand how the labelling for trains worked but I didn´t so instead of being in Brussels by 10am, I ended up in Eindhoven before realizing I was heading in the wrong direction. If you look at a map and look for Delft, Brussels and Eindhoven, you´ll get a sense for how far out of my way I was getting. Luckily, I was able to get myself to Brussels to catch my reserved Paris train otherwise I would´ve been really fucked. At least along the way to Paris, I talked to this pretty interesting American businessman who owns his own agriculture consulting business. I tried to get an insider´s view on the corn-ethanol fiasco.

In Paris, my day of a comedy of errors continued: I tried to book a reservation on the night train for the next day but it was completely booked. I had to settle for that night´s train to Barcelona which only gave me like 3-4 hours in Paris. I walked through some of the streets, technically saw Notre Dame and la tour Eiffel and sat down for an unimpressive french meal. While I did get some fresh oyesters and a really refreshing ice cream sorbet thing, the main course was pretty disapointing. Some cream over bland fish and bitter veggies. At least the mushrooms were good in it. I got a complemetary post card that I might send off to one of you lucky readers.

Alright, I think that´s enough for one post. I´ll talk about the train to Barcelona and the city itself next time. A little preview: la sagrada familia is fucking awesome with an emphasis on awe. And photos will still come at some point... maybe when I have more patience with laptops or get to a desktop... or at least a mouse.

Day 1: Amsterdam

So, I´m currently in the library in Amsterdam and abusing their free internet. Unfortunately, I can´t post any pictures as I don´t have access to the computer itself. Also, the punctuation on the keyboards is all fucked up. Other than the basics of periods, commas and apostrophes, everything listed on the keyboard doesn´t correspond to the right punctuating mark. Anyway, the flight and everything up to now has been pretty smooth sailing and the next big test will be what I do for getting down to Barcelona.

But let me start a little more chronologically. From the plane, I had a conversation with a lovely woman named Judith. She and her husband were just heading back to Holland from a two-week vacation in BC. They were in Vancouver and the Okanagan mainly. She was telling me a bit about Holland, her family and even helped me a bit with some pronounciations of Dutch. Worse comes to worse, I´ve made a friend that I can call or even randomly drop by her house if something bad happens here.

On the brief train ride from the airport to AMS centraal station, I met up with a few students from Georgia. They had also just graduated from university and were just starting a one month trip around Europe. In retrospect, I totally should have gotten a photo with them and me in it just to say address Morgan´s challenge of finding a girl for me and him. The two girls were pretty cute... for the record, the names were Kelsey, Jenny and Cameron I believe. Hopefully, I´ll run into them later as amsterdam is somewhat small... Sadly, I had to leave them since I needed to validate my rail pass and book a train from here to Paris. I´ll actually try to stop by for a few hours in Brussels and get a beer and maybe some moules et frites.

Waiting for the rail pass... which took something like 1.5 hours!... I grabbed some groceries to sate me for a day or so. Sandwich material and some bananas for ~7 euro. Much better than the 5 euro or so prices for a single fastfood meal. I´ll probably go to an actual restaurant tomorrow and then to a club after. Also while waiting, I talked to this girl from Australia. She had just gotten out of highschool and was making a point to travel the world before heading to uni to study musical theatre. I didn´t get her name before heading off to the counter to deal with my rail pass but her most memorable feature were her ridiculously worn in boots. They weren´t made for the 10 weeks of travelling she had done to this point... they were clearly quite fashionable at some point but now had mucho character in the holes forming in the leather.

Anyway, since then, I found a hostel pretty easily for 25. Not a bad location and seems pretty clean although there´s construction going on presently. I´ll probably try to crash in the train station and catch an early one friday evening. Unless Rose is amiable to me crashing on her couch. Rose is a friend I briefly met last summer who was working with Morgan and was on exchange from here. I just messaged her and miraculously, she does love in Amsterdam! Hopefully we´ll catch up some later tonight.

Wandering around Amsterdam has been pretty cool. We flew in to rain but since then, it´s cleared up quite nicely. Pictures will come at some point. The city centre is really well designed. I was talking to Ben a few days ago about the North American trend towards creating walkable-urbanism as opposed to the sprawling suburbia our city planning has followed for the last century. Amsterdam is the epitome of walkable urbanism. Admittedly, many of the cities in europe were constructed long before vehicles were made so it´s more a byproduct of centuries of necessity but regardless it´s really nice to be able to see almost everything without needing to even hop on a bus. I´ll probably rent a bike tomorrow but I think I´ve already walked around quite a bit of the city.

Anyway, I´ll leave the post here for now. Next, one more day in AMS, then a few hours in Brussels and a night in Paris - the city.

Off to Europe!

Alright so I've never quite found a grove/purpose for this blog. For now, I'm going to attempt to make this a travel journal. Right now, I'm sitting in the fizz penthouse, waiting to go for coffee and lunch with friends on campus before heading off the YVR to catch a flight to amsterdam. I'm quite excited and anxious, way more so than graduation. I am going to be traveling largely alone too.

Anyway, I'm off. Will try to update as much as possible and maybe at some point advertise this to friends...