Hurry up and wait...

Have you ever thought about how many times in life you "hurry up and wait?" It's true. My friend Daphne pointed this fact out this weekend. A group of 6 of us Harlaxton girls were planning a trip to Amsterdam. We did a poor job planning... leaving on a day when we had a required field trip... almost missing our train... and making it to our flight check-in with 6 minutes to spare. We had 20 minutes to find our departure gate in London Stansted Airport. We ran our little hearts out. We jumped on a tram to take us to gate 30, we thought we were going the wrong way and I felt like I was going to faint. There was no time for error. Lauren had a slight asthma attack, but retrieved her inhaler while we took a short break up one of the escalators. We arrived to our gate with 10 minutes to spare, only to find out our flight had been delayed due to bad weather in Amsterdam. (Hurry up and wait.)

That was fine with us. Sure, we had rushed for no reason, but now we had time to get some food and just sit. The next announcement over the load speaker told us that our flight was delayed an hour and a half. When that time finally rolled around we loaded up our carry-on luggage. As we were making our way to form a line there was another announcement: Easyjet flight 2398 to Amsterdam has been canceled. Please take a seat in the gate 30 area and wait for further announcements. We were freaking out.. Oh great! What were we supposed to do now? Sleep in the Airport? Not that this is a big deal, because I've done it 3 times now in the last month.

We waited patiently for the next announcement. They said Easyjet would take care of our accomodations. Our entire flight made their way down an escalator and onto a bus that took us to retrieve our luggage. Next we walked a 100 yards or so to a hotel: the Radisson SAS. It's a new hotel, and it was awesome. We had to pay nothing. We just showed our boarding passes and they gave us a room key. Caitlin and I roomed together. We screamed when we walked in our room. . . . flat-screen TV, telephone in the bathroom, heated tile floors in the bathroom, mini-bar (sensory activated: if you took something, the front desk would automatically know). Next we found out that at 10:30 there would be a full buffet open for us. hooray! we enjoyed it and also met some new friends... Erica from New York who was studying in Salemanca, Spain... 4 Italian boys on Spring Break: Jessepi, Marco, Pierro & Luigi.

We had to be up the next morning at 6:30 a.m. for breakfast and to find out about our new flight time. (free breakfast, of course) It turns out, Stansted Airport could not accomodate our flight that morning, so we loaded coach buses to London Gatwick Airport (an hour and a half away). We finally departed for Amsterdam some time after noon.

We checked into our Hostel (the Bulldog) located just outside the Red Light District. It was pretty nice for a hostel, but it was no Radisson SAS. We walked around a bit and had some dinner. We called it an early night because we were tired from our traveling.

It was soooo cold. In fact, our receptionist told us that Thursday night was the coldest weather Amsterdam had received in 20-some years. great! We always pick the best times to visit places. ha.

http://www.holland.com/uk/

Friday we got up pretty early and we visited the Anne Frank House. Next we went to the Heineken Brewery where we took a tour of the factory and learned how they made this famous Dutch beer. My favorite part was a ride where you pretended you were a Heineken bottle going through the factory. It was funny... they shook you up and bounced you around. After the factory we split up. Four of us took a tram towards a shopping area. When we got to the stop we wanted the door wouldn't open on our section of the tram and we started banging on it and the tram just moved onto the next stop. It was okay. We still knew where we were, but we were several blocks away from where we wanted to shop. It was pretty funny. The Dutch people on the tram were laughing at us.

Later that night we went to a comedy club called Boom Chicago. It was amazing, and oh so funny. It was similar to "Whose Line is it Anyway," if you've seen that show. It was all improv. We arrived early and got seats in the front row. The cast asked for crowd suggestions all night. They used several of our suggestions because, well 1) we were in the front and they could hear us better, 2) we just had great ideas. :)

At the end they sang a song to our friend, Daphne, incorporating info about her: working at McDonalds, McFlurry, Big Mac, her hometown: Washington, Indiana. It was really funny. The six of us stayed after the show and chatted with the cast. They were so cool.

Saturday was really cold and snowy. We all took the tram to the Van Gogh Museum. It was expensive to get in, but it was so worth it. We spent over 2 hours there. Next we ate lunch at McDonald's and we even rode a Carousel that was set up in the center (centre) of the city. We spent our last few hours in Amsterdam souvenir shopping. Because I'm from Holland (Indiana) I was a horrible tourist and shopper. I wanted to buy everything, because everything either said "Holland" or had a windmill or tulips on it. I managed to control my urges, but I still spent more than I should have. Oh well. How many times do you get to Amsterdam, Holland, the Netherlands? Exactly.

Our flight on the way back was, you guessed it, delayed an hour. It was fine though because we didn't have a train to catch that night. In fact, all the trains would be done running for the night. Our only option would be to catch one the next morning at 7 a.m. This meant we'd have to stay in London Luton Airport all night. There weren't any benches or any places to sleep. Our only options were to find a hotel or try and get a taxi back to Grantham. We knew it would be expensive because Grantham is just over 2 hours away by car. We were right: £150 ($300 US). Luckily we had 6 girls and were able to get a 6-person taxi van... making our final expense only £25 a person ($50). It was well worth it.

What a great trip! You can check out my new pictures: http://community.webshots.com/user/ashleyhenke
(album: Amsterdam ... on page 2)