AmsterDAAAAMMMMMM

Winterland Amsterdam '10

Holy puente, I love Spain!!  Puente is spanish for "bridge" and i have grown to love our wonderful puentes here.  They mean long weekends in terms of working and school which is precisely why they are soooo fantastic.  If there just so happens to be a holiday that falls on a thursday or Tuesday, they go ahead and call that Friday or Monday off of school, hence the word "bridge" used.  It's kind of like having thanksgiving on a thursday every year and just not doing anything that Friday either.  Well we had a wonderful puente this past week and it lasted for 3 whole freakin days.  Marvelous.  Due to the fact that this just so happened to fall on my birthday as well (which I am pretty sure they did on purpose since I am just that important over here...siiiiike!) We decided to take this opportunity and travel.  A lot.  We started our travels in Holland and I am convinced this is where I am destined to live.  Forever.  The men are tall, handsome, and all speak english. HOLLER!  Never in my life have a met a country of happier people.  No seriously, all of them are happy and love speaking in perfect english to all the wide eyed happy tourists.  We started our trip by stepping off the plane at the amsterdam airport and boarding the train to what we thought was going to be the center of the city.  Well this was only supposed to be a short ride and after about 30 minutes we decided we were certainly not in the right place.  We asked where we were and were promptly told that the next stop would be Utricht.  Fantastic city, however NOT where we were supposed to be.  AWESOME.  We get off the train, ask a worker which train we were supposed to be on and were answered with "are you guys high?? wouldn't you like to be?? do you smell the weed in this place? Yeah, the sign on the side of the train said 'Amsterdam central' but it's broke so I'm not surprised you wound up here.  Take that train over there and you'll be in Amsterdam Central soon enough".  Yep, pretty much as nonchallant as they come.  Well, we got on the right train, landed in Amsterdam and walked for about an hour in the fridged cold to our hostel.  When we arrived we were given our room and bed numbers and decided to drop our stuff off and explore for a bit.  It was only about 11 so we figured we had plenty of time before things were shutting down.  We got in the room and were greeted by a man that was very much under the influence of something crazy and his two friends were sound asleep in beds.  That sounds wonderful but the problem is that one of the beds that one of them was in just so happened to be mine and his bed was dirty and had shit on it too so I couldn't even trade them.  No biggy, we went down stairs and asked if there were any other clean beds so that guy could sleep off whatever it was that he needed to sleep off and not cause too much trouble and we were on our way to explore.  We were gone for about 2 hours and arrived back to our hostel to see an ambulence parked outside.  When we got inside we saw the 3 guys that were in our room down stairs and one was hooked up to a machine checking his vitals.  perfect, we come in to amsterdam, cause problems, and have the ambulence called in on our roommates after we kicked them out of bed.  Needless to say we didn't really make friends in that place.  We saw everything the city had to offer and lived as a local for the day we were there.  It snowed like a snow globe on the last day we were there, which just so happened to by my birthday.  Which again, I am partially convinced was a gift from God just for me since I love snow so much :)  You will have to check out facebook to get all the pictures, but we really had a great time.  We ran for about 30 minutes in the blizzard to our bus that eventually got us to Brugges and so ended a wonderful stay in a wonderful city :)