Arriving in Amsterdam
It was Sunday night, and the 7-hour ride into Amsterdam was hot and crowded with backpackers and Dutch weekenders returning home. I made it through and even got an hour or two of sleep, but water and earplugs were essential to my survival.
The bus arrived at 5:30am and I staggered out into an empty suburban bus station, without a clue how to get downtown and without a place to sleep once I got there. Fortunately, an Aussie girl named Bree happened to be in the same situation as I, and we jointly navigated our way to the train which took us downtown. Bree had been touring Europe for 3 months, was running out of money, and was planning to go to London to work and finance the remainder of her two-year adventure away from Melbourne, her home. She was 26 and worked in travel sales back home, and she hoped to find some job that was related to her specialty, but was not above waitressing if she had to.
Bree had a tattered volume of "Europe Cheap", which identified several hostels in the vicinity of the downtown train station. A couple hostels promisingly advertised 24 hour check-in, so we made our way for one of them, a famous joint (sorry, couldn't resist) known as the Flying Pig. Unfortunately, however, an Amsterdam day was apparently longer than average, because when we rang the bell a voice told us to come back at 8:30. We wandered the ghostly empty street until sunrise, discovering that opening times in cafes and bakeries bore little relation to the hours of operation posted on the doors. Even the "24-hour" cash exchange at the train station was inexplicably closed.
Finally, we found somewhere to have a roll and hot tea, and I learned for the first time that Amsterdam prices bite. Between 8:30 and 9:30 we were finally checked into the Pig, as the staff muddled their way through various computer problems in the characteristically slow fashion of committed marijuana smokers.
The bus arrived at 5:30am and I staggered out into an empty suburban bus station, without a clue how to get downtown and without a place to sleep once I got there. Fortunately, an Aussie girl named Bree happened to be in the same situation as I, and we jointly navigated our way to the train which took us downtown. Bree had been touring Europe for 3 months, was running out of money, and was planning to go to London to work and finance the remainder of her two-year adventure away from Melbourne, her home. She was 26 and worked in travel sales back home, and she hoped to find some job that was related to her specialty, but was not above waitressing if she had to.
Bree had a tattered volume of "Europe Cheap", which identified several hostels in the vicinity of the downtown train station. A couple hostels promisingly advertised 24 hour check-in, so we made our way for one of them, a famous joint (sorry, couldn't resist) known as the Flying Pig. Unfortunately, however, an Amsterdam day was apparently longer than average, because when we rang the bell a voice told us to come back at 8:30. We wandered the ghostly empty street until sunrise, discovering that opening times in cafes and bakeries bore little relation to the hours of operation posted on the doors. Even the "24-hour" cash exchange at the train station was inexplicably closed.
Finally, we found somewhere to have a roll and hot tea, and I learned for the first time that Amsterdam prices bite. Between 8:30 and 9:30 we were finally checked into the Pig, as the staff muddled their way through various computer problems in the characteristically slow fashion of committed marijuana smokers.
posted by Dmitri Evseev at 9:51 PM
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