Amsterdam.
I had wanted to upload some photos with these next couple posts, but it seems as though my one camera is currently out of batteries, making this a bit of an impossibility.
So what does one say about Amsterdam? What a BEAUTIFUL city! It was warm, clean, sunny and just lovely. The public transportation was quick and super easy to figure out. Emily and I took a 12-hour bus ride overnight from London to Amsterdam, and so we arrived at around 9am. It sounds worse than it actual was - the most annoying part was having to get out of the bus for the ferry ride across to France (as we couldn’t just take a few sleeping pills and pass out). Nick flew in that morning on a flight from London and we met up at our hotel - Westcord Fashion Hotel, which was just on the outer skirts of Amsterdam, about a 10 minute tram ride into the city centre. After we got settled, we decided to explore the city and eventually made out way to the red light district. it was…..interesting? to say the least. Not as shocking as I’d thought it would be, and not all dingy and closed off (well apart from the very small alleyways). the main street was pretty and open, the only thing to distinguish it from the rest of Amsterdam was metal posts with red lights around them upon entering, and the red neon lights around some of the window panes.
We had all been pretty jet-lagged and tired since London however, so we called it a relatively early night. After exploring some of the red-light district, we stopped in for some very large, extra cold Heinekens and headed home for a blissful sleep in a real bed - apart from the fact that it was three of us to to essentially a double bed. But that’s just a minor detail.
The next day, Nick’s friend Tim met us at our hotel early in the morning (having also flown in from London), and after we’d all had a nice little sleep-in we decided to do some more exploring (and hopefully find some costumes for the Czech-out Party we’ll be attending in Prague). Emily and I took advantage of the fact that Nick’s friend Tim was around and decided to split off from them and have a girls day. We picked up some great hats for our costume, saw the Van Gogh museum and the I Amsterdam sign, Dam square, the royal palace, the national monument, and we got some nice little sun-tans in the warm weather.
We met back up at the hotel at around 7pm to shower and get ready to go out with Nick’s friend Cathy. She took us all out to the red light district again, but this time we frequented a peep-show. Initially it was just a girl gyrating around with a fake-smile plastered on her face, but I guess every hour on the hour they show actual sex so we waited around for that. The whole thing was just….odd. If sex ever becomes that much of a chore I think I’d be pretty upset. Afterwards, Cathy had to head home but she directed us to a cool jazz bar called Sugar Factory. Even though it was a Sunday night it was very busy! and quite a cool concept; it was live jazz music being played over like techno beats. One thing Emily and I noticed about Amsterdam however, was that the ratio of guys to girls seems to be completely out of whack. Everywhere we went we felt like we were some of the only girls - and not just in the red light district. This bar was no exception, apart from the stage which seemed to have quite a few girls dancing on it. At one point we were on the dance floor and we were essentially surrounded at all sides by boys. Very weird.
Emily and I bussed back to London while Nick and Tim flew, so we parted ways late afternoon on our last day in Amsterdam. Our bus ride back to London however, was a bit of a disaster. The french/English border control was (understandably) hard on buses returning from Amsterdam across the channel to London, and the bus in front of us apparently had a lot of “problems”, requiring us to wait more than 45 minutes behind it before we were even allowed through passport control. This meant, of course, that we missed our 4am ferry and had to wait until 6am, throwing off our arrival time in London by almost two hours. We had arranged to take a noon 10-hour bus to Glasgow from London, but we had stored some stuff at Tim’s to pick up in between. Obviously, with missing our first ferry this was going to be an impossibility and so we will just have to pick up our stuff on July 23rd on our way to Goodwood. We need to keep reminding ourselves that this is all just a practice for all the stuff that is going to go terrible, horribly wrong on this rally.
More to come on our time in Glasgow, our car and standard driving (with pictures!) to come soon!
*GCBeavers
