Mi primer viaje afuera de España: Amsterdam

I will apologize right now for the extreme length of the post. I can't bring myself to summarize -- I had too much fun to exclude all the unimportant details.

I caught a bus from Granada to Madrid (5 hours) Wednesday night at 1pm, took drammamine (thank you Liz!) and slept the entire time. In Madrid, I expertly navigated the metro and got to the massive Madrid airport (step down MIA and O'Hare -- you have to get on a highway to switch terminals in Madrid) way before my flight. The French were on strike apparently, so planes were all delayed. I missed my connection (barely) because my flight was over 3 hours late! But instead of catching one five hours later (thank you Lufthansa for rescheduling me on that flight...), a magic flight person printed me a boarding pass for one that left half an hour after I arrived in Frankfurt. After, again, mastering public transit in foreign languages, I got to my hostel in Amsterdam and went out for Heinekens with Cameron. Every city in Europe I've been to has such pride in its beer...

Instead of giving a play by play of the whole weekend, I'll just insert some photos. There are certain things that are not in the photos... and those were fun too.


The whole sign says: I amsterdam with the "I am" in red. Obviously ridiculously touristy, but it is a sweet sign.


We went to an amazing beads store. I'm not normally a huge beads fan or anything, but this was an awesome store. And the store was also completely organized by color which excites me.


This is essentially everything Amsterdam: clogs and tulips (the clogs are really seeds to grow tulips).


Also, tons of canals in Amsterdam. Like how did they even begin to build this city?


Saturday morning we went to this amazing pancake place. We do not have pancakes or waffles or anything in Spain and so they were triple amazing here. Mine has bananas, chocolate and whipped cream. Oh and speaking of breakfast desserts, the waffles they have in the little stores coated in chocolate and heated up and absolutely delicious.


Spent most of Saturday looking at shops like this. They had the silliest stuff -- little metal men to hold your pot up when it's hot, strange pig-shaped things, rubber duckie headphones, etc. It was colorful and wonderful. There were also a lot of robots.


So I know this is a classic fb pic, but it's going to be the photo rep of all the fun clubs and bars we went to. Seriously Amsterdam is so much fun. We met lots of strange people and our hostel was next to the red light district which was pretty surreal. Those girls actually stand in windows with red lights. Who knew that was reality? ALSO I will use it as a segue to say that half the fun of the weekend was the people (James, Max, and Will were there too) and it was GREAT to see my beautiful friends again.

Other notes without pictures: Went to the Van Gogh museum and it was pretty spectacular. Such beautiful paintings -- the brushwork is so phenomenal. I wasn't allowed to take any pictures or I would post them. In terms of being "cultural", we also went to the large park, which was starkly majestic in the winter time, and saw the tulip market (and the tulip museum actually). The city was just beautiful and we spent a lot of time just walking up and down the streets and over all the canals. My trip home was wonderful too -- my flight was canceled and so I got rescheduled on a direct flight that left earlier and got me home much sooner than I had planned. And now I'm home in Granada and I love it. Studying abroad = best idea ever.