Amsterdam

I'm sorry for not updating this as I should.  The days seem to go by so fast and each weekend we are off to another country.  On October 29-31 a group of us went to Amsterdam to see the gorgeous canal city.  There was a lot of students from our school there, but we traveled with 14 of us (6 girls, and 8 boys).  We flew out of East Midlands early Friday morning (the same day they found the bomb on the cargo plane - a little too close to home if you ask me).  The 14 of us were split up between three different hostels, so the 6 of us girls set off to find our hostel as soon as we got there.  We stayed in a Christian Youth Hostel, as we were told these were the safest and nicest to stay at in Amsterdam.  We checked in and took a quick nap, as we had gotten up at 3:00 Am to catch the taxi to the airport in time.  Then we explored the city for a little bit.  We walked around the streets by all the cafes and canals in between streets.  We visited the "I Amsterdam" sign and saw the outside of the Van Gogh Museum, but decided it was too expensive to visit. 

On Saturday we woke up and explored the city some more - only to realize that our hostel was in the red light district.  Our hostel was very nice and I'm glad we stayed there, but it was ironic that it was in the red light district.  While exploring Amsterdam on Saturday we came across a couple Halloween pub crawls and decided it would be fun if we did one as a big group.  We ended up choosing one that let the first ten girls in for free.  Guess what? We got in for free.  We didn't have very good costumes because we had been told that Amsterdam doesn't celebrate Halloween (which they really don't, very few people were dressed up).  We did pull together some costumes and had a very fun night walking around Amsterdam.

On Sunday, our plane didn't leave til later in the day, so we had a good day to do some last minute shopping and visit the Sunday markets.  It did rain a little on Sunday, so that was a bummer, but we still had fun.  Once at the airport, we had a two hour delay and didn't end up getting home until 12:30 in the morning and we all had a British Studies quiz the next day.  Overall, it was a really fun weekend with good friends.  I would love to go back to Holland sometime in the summer when all the tulips are in full bloom, but as for now, I had a great time in the Netherlands.