Plane to Amsterdam

Getting on the plane at midnight, I was starting to get a bit tired. I didn’t realize that it would be a 12.5 hours flight to arrive in Amsterdam. It’s one of the longer plane rides I’ve been on. The first movie I saw was Memoirs of a Geisha, which was ok. I don’t see what the big deal was about it though.

The dinner I had was fish, but it wasn’t good at all. I was also flying alone on this flight too. So I was watching a Korean movie on the seat TV next to mine. I really like this movie even though I’ve seen it before on my previous flight when I was coming back from Korea. The movie is called Mr. Housewife. I was successful in sleeping on the plane for about 6-7 hours and without getting sick. That was the more important part, not getting sick.

We are about to have breakfast in a few moments and there’s still about 3 hours to go. It’s pretty cold right now on the plane and I haven’t experienced that before.

The breakfast really wasn’t that great. This was the first time that I didn’t like the food on the plane. Usually it is tolerable, but it was harder to tolerate it today. We landed about 3 hours later. I was watching Hercules, the animated movie by Disney. I thought it was good and I also watched Mr. Housewife again too.

When I was leaving the airport, I got stopped by police twice and they were only 3 feet from each other. I was wondering what was up with that. I didn’t like the airport that much. It wasn’t as convenient as I have read. It was a pain in the ass to get bills converted to coins. I had to buy a $2 Snickers bar to get change in order to make a phone call using the pay phone. Then I got charged extra to use the person at the ticket counter instead of using the ticket machine. The trains are smooth, small in seats, and a bit slow.

When I arrived at Central Station Amsterdam, I had to figure out how to get to the hostel. The people at the counter were only semi-helpful, not very enthusiastic either. It was very easy to locate the hostel though.

Once I got there, I dropped off my stuff and decided to walk around and explore. I walked all over the place for about 2 hours. I saw some magnificent views of the city and to major places that I saw in the maps and tour books. I’m staying in the museum district so I saw the famous museums like the Van Gogh, Rijks, and I continued and found a Meidi-ya store too. I was a bit shocked to find it and it was in the outskirts of the city too. I went inside to take a look, it was interesting. There weren’t any Japanese people working there, as I would have imagined.

Another thing I noticed is that the Dutch are very tall. It’s a world designed for tall people. I went back to the hostel to check in and go check out the room.

The room was ok, just 3 bunk beds. I’m in a room with 5 other people all in the same group, which didn’t work out for me very well though. They were all from Belgium and they were a bit loud too.

SEK came soon after that. I was talking with the guy at the counter, who actually knew SEK, so we talked a bit more before we took off. It was great to see SEK today. I haven’t seen her in about a year.

We just walked around and talked. We talked a whole lot, which was great. We walked a bit far and we ended up at a Dutch Pancake place. It was awesome. The taste was great. I ordered a bacon and cheese pancake and it was really good. It reminds me a lot of crepes, so it was good.

We went walking around a bit more. It was mostly going to different areas and I was taking some pictures. The weather is a bit schizo, and it rains all of a sudden and then becomes sunny. It would warm then cool. It would be warm then cool. We went into many stores to see things. It is very interesting because everything is very liberal and most places had bongs and XXX things. It was very interesting to see all of those things on display and in many stores. We went to a flower market, which is supposed to be very famous and to the area where Anne Frank’s house is.

We stopped at an area near Dam Square at a place called Australian. We chilled there till we got hungry and we decided to search out a nice Indonesian restaurant. There’s a restaurant in the area that is called FEBO and that place has food in vending machines. Food I mean like having hot dogs and hamburgers in vending machines. It was really interesting to see that.

It took us a little while to locate an Indonesian restaurant and we were walking all over the place. We talked more and decided God was being cruel to us and moving it around. About 2 hours later, we found one. It seemed nice from the outside.

We got into more serious conversations about our exes while we were there and didn’t do much eating. We barely ate and we had to bag it and take it home. The conversation was very good. I found out a lot more things about people that I have never known and probably never would have found out either. I was surprised that I lasted this long since I haven’t been getting that much sleep, but still I’m ok.

We took the tram back to the hostel, and there was one guy there talking to us. It was ok, kind of freaky. He kept on “raining” on me and his accent was killing me. It was a unique experience for me for sure, but not one that I wanted tonight.

Soon after that I arrived back at the hostel. My roommates were all back already and ready for bed. I showered and then headed for bed. They were a bit messy and loud.