Well, I'm really bad at this blog thing, apparently. I should probably apologize to all of those who I promised that I would keep up with this regularly. I had no idea just how busy I would be, and just how tired I would be when not busy. My days are incredibly full, and with so many people constantly around it is very difficult to focus on sitting down and writing on this. Hopefully I will become a little bit better about it from here on out, but I can not promise anything.
The last couple of weeks have been full of many adventures and even more fun than I could have ever imagined that I would have had. Don't get me wrong, I never doubted that this trip would be the time of my life or that I would have an absolute blast... but the fun that I have been having is so different than what I thought it would be. When looking forward to this trip, all I could think about was "I'm going to see the Eiffel Tower," "I'm going to Greece," "I'm going to Ireland," etc, etc. I have been truly blessed to see so many amazing sights and in just five days I will be on free travel, able to see whatever I want to see for 2 weeks. However, the most amazing part of this trip has been the amazing times that I have had with WONDERFUL people. It has not been so much about the places, but about the adventures. I am so blessed.
On the weekend of September 20, six of us went to Amsterdam to spend Friday, Saturday and Sunday morning. The group was given a free weekend with the requirement to be back in time for worship on Sunday night so several people went to Berlin, Germany, some people went to Switzerland and the six of us went to Amsterdam. We were a little bit nervous about getting there and making it to our hostel, but we arrived and the only glitch that we encountered was that our hostel was 30 minutes away by bus from the city center. We were all a little disgruntled that we had to buy bus passes for the weekend, but it ended up working out because Amsterdam is very spread out so we would have needed to buy them anyway. After we dropped our stuff off at our hostel (which turned out to be a lot nicer than we thought it would-- although we had to walk down this ridiculously long hallway to get to our room... it was like The Shining or something lol) we took the bus back to the city center because we wanted to eat Chinese food and had read about a great place to eat for cheap. We arrived at the place and decided quickly that it was not somewhere we wanted to eat so we ended up going somewhere else that cost us an extra euro or two to eat at, but was REALLY good. I'm getting a Chinese craving just thinking about it.
By the time we finished eating dinner it was around 9:30 (we didn't even get into town till about 7) and so we decided to just walk around and see the sights and find things that we might possibly want to do the next day. We turned the corner and the next thing we knew, we were right in the middle of the Red Light District. The streets literally glow red because the windows were the girls are displaying themselves (I was surprised by how covered they were... really most of them just looked like they were in skimpy bathing suits) are lit up with red neon lights and it lights the whole street that color. After our run in with the Red Light District, we decided to walk more towards the City Center and found lots of shopping areas and museums and everything.
The next day, we decided that we wanted to rent pedal boats because Amsterdam is a canal city. We found out that the pedal boat place was in front of the Anne Frank house which worked out nicely because we wanted to see that too. After spending an hour on the pedal boats (those things are TIRING!!), we finally found our way back to the place where we were supposed to drop them off and then went over to the Anne Frank house. When we got there, we saw that the line was wrapped around the block-- no joke!... so we decided that we didn't care to see the house that badly and instead went to the Torture Museum across town. The rest of the day consisted of us walking around and shopping, trying to go rock climbing (it's a REALLY long story as to why it didn't work out) and eating dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe. We were so very excited to be eating somewhere that reminded us of home!
Sunday morning we got up and went to catch our train and made it back to the facility in time to get some laundry done before we had our worship service. It was an incredibly crazy night as we were having to get ready to leave for Greece the very next day. That's a story for the next blog though. Hopefully I will get it up here sometime later today.
I love and miss y'all very very much!
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