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| Erin's Journal for 10-15-02 to 10-16-02 The last few days in Amsterdam were a sort of waiting period for us. We spent several hours on the 15th finishing up our website updates, then took a boat tour of the city. We were 2 out of 4 people on our entire boat, and the tour was a little hampered by the rain and overcast. But it was good to get a little more on the history of the city and its canals. The boat captain didn't understand any of our questions though, so we had a tough time expanding on any of the tidbits the electronic tour guide would periodically spit out. The 16th was almost entirely spent in searching out a place to transfer our photos from our camera cards to a cd. For such a large, seemingly up-to-date city, we were amazed by how few places would do this, and horrified by the price and conditions of the stores that did! They each wanted to put only one card's worth of pictures on each cd, meaning to put all our photos on cd we'd have to purchase 5 new cd's at 7 Euros a pop (and that was the very cheapest place we found!). They also refused to put more photos on the cd we already had, which is only half full! So after 6 hours wasted in trying the next store and the next and the next, we went back to the cheapest one we'd found and had them do just one of the cards, my largest full one. The rest would have to wait till we find a better spot - this service could be done by ourselves, given a read-write cd drive! The last night of our stay in Europe would have to be somewhere other than the Best Western, as they were bumping that special rate of $50 up to an outrageous $95 for the very same room! So as we pursued our cd efforts, we watched for hostels near the train station, so we could make a quick getaway in the morning to the airport (it's a 25 minute train ride from Amsterdam by train to the airport). We found a place 2 blocks from the train station in a quiet side street called Anna's Hostel, which had reasonable beds in a large dorm (18 beds for the smaller room) for a very good price. We moved there on our last day and were just fine with it, as it was only one night. Our last dinner in Amsterdam was an Argentinian restaurant where we had great meat dishes and romantic candlelight. Tomorrow, on to Nairobi! |
| The Rijksmuseum is right next door to the Van Gogh museum |