The last full day

I’m nearing the end of my trip since this is the last full day I have left. There were many places that I did not end up seeing, but I did peek into SEK’s life which was probably more interesting.

The plan today is to go to Rotterdam, but we were supposed to leave at 10am and it’s 10:30am now and I believe everyone is still sleeping. I got up at 9am because I couldn’t sleep. But I need to start getting adjusted to Tokyo time now. I will probably go make some breakfast now since I’m starting to get hungry. I don’t know what I would do today if I didn’t go to Rotterdam, but I think this would be a wasted opportunity.

To my surprise, we actually ended up going. It didn’t seem so likely since we got off to a late start. They got ready pretty quickly and we were off to Central Station Amsterdam. It was the first time I rode a bike in years and I mean since elementary school. I picked it up really quickly although the bike was a little big for me. It was a quick ride over. SEK rode on the back of Xavier’s bike and I rode on my own. We bought a ticket to Rotterdam around 12:20pm. We bought some things at Albert Hejms then we got on the train. The train ride was exactly an hour from central station to central station. We had a little problem with tickets we bought because they weren’t stamped. I thought that it was weird and we almost got fined 35 Euros for it. But they gave us a warning and we were ok after that.

When we arrived in Rotterdam, the rain was falling, so it was a miserable day. We walked down the Chinatown district there and to some museums. We went into one of them and spent about an hour there. The museum wasn’t really so interesting, but it was fun to chill out there. From that point, we hung out at a café near the museum because they had a map of Rotterdam on the menu. We probably stayed there an hour or so talking. I ordered an apple pie and hot chocolate which were both good, the apple pie the other night was much better though.

We decided to go out, even though it was raining a lot. We walked to a place where there were buildings were shaped like a cube on its corner. So it looked like diamonds. There happen to be a marker (flen) at that time too. So we walked around there for a bit too.

From there, we walked towards the bridge and there was a WWII memorial there. We headed towards the New York Hotel. We decided to have dinner there. I ordered onion soup with a chicken wrap with guacamole and jalapeños. The soup was good, but the chicken wrap was rather average. It was a fairly expensive restaurant to eat at.

From there, it was about to be 7pm so we started to head back to Amsterdam. It took an hour to get back. SEK and Xavier were sleeping pretty much the whole way and I wasn’t sleepy so I stayed awake.

When we got back, we biked to Renee’s house to pick up Xavier’s cell phone, which he left at her place. She’s a Canadian student that is a friend of Xavier. We stayed there till 10pm before we started looking for a place to buy some alcohol for Peter’s and Steven’s farewell party. We found a place and biked quite a distance to get there. There living arrangement was much better than SEK’s. It was much cleaner too. It was a big enough place to fit everyone.

At first, I felt left out because I really didn’t know anyone, but I just started walking around joining some conversations. I was happy that I wasn’t shy about it. It was a bit difficult at first since everyone was very cliquish. The food there was excellent. I couldn’t stop eating, it was really that good.

Another first for me was that I finished half a beer. It was Amstel which wasn’t so bad, but had a poor after taste. I knew that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea because I will be flying back to Tokyo tomorrow. I was glad to have met new people, although some of them weren’t cool. But a majority of them were. I didn’t hang out with SEK for most of the night.

We left around 2:30am and didn’t get home till around 3am. I think that I might have over stayed because I could sense SEK not wanting to spend more time with me. When we got back, she crashed and I showered and slept.