Amsterdam It

Personal

I, once again, had a mishap with public transportation. I was leaving my host home late at night to go watch the Superbowl with some friends. Attempting to leave quietly so as not to disturb my host family, I closed the door slowly. As I reached for my key to lock the door, I realized that I had left my purse inside. Unfortunately, my front door locks automatically from the outside. Even more unfortunately, my purse contained not only my key, but my German handy, my money, and my transit pass. The last thing I wanted to do was wake up my host family to get back inside. Therefore, I headed to my bus stop hoping the night bus would let me on without a pass. I waited at the stop for a few minutes before seeing a bus come up from the opposite direction. It stopped at the bus stop on the other side of the street and moved on. After several more minutes, I noticed that my bus was late and started to get worried. After checking my bus schedule, I slowly began to realize that the bus that had come was my bus and that it only went in one direction. Therefore, the next bus wouldn't come for an hour. To make sure no one was waiting on me when I had said I would arrive, I was forced to turn off airplane mode on my phone and type out some expensive texts. The cold and the lateness of the hour tempted me to take a taxi, but as I walked up to one on the curb, I remembered that I didn't have any money. I decided to just keep walking to another bus stop on the route to keep myself warm. The bus eventually arrived and the driver mercifully let me on without my pass. After a long bus ride, I finally got to the central station and waited again for a night bus. It seemed that all the buses were running late until one man who didn't speak any English indicated that no buses were coming. It turns out that buses don't run all night on Sunday evenings. With no ideas left, I checked my phone. A friend suggested that I take a taxi and they pay for it when I get there (I wished I had thought of that before). So I went around looking for a taxi and got up enough courage to ask some people where I should go. They didn't seem to be German but could speak English, and they indicated that they were wondering the same thing. A taxi happened to pull up at that moment and they offered to let me take it. It took several minutes for me to explain to the driver where I needed to go, but he eventually found it on the map and we showed up at the house. As it was now very early in the morning, I got to see the last minute of the Superbowl, but it was hard to even enjoy that as the night had been rather frightening. As with my previous transportation difficulties, I learned from my mistakes and hopefully won't make the same ones again.

This weekend, I and several of the other students took a trip to Amsterdam. While it is a unique and beautiful city with the overlapping canals and beautiful buildings, I don't think I would ever want to go back. First of all, everything was extremely overpriced. Furthermore, the public transportation was confusing because there were two separate bus companies and transit passes could only work for one or the other. The woman at the information desk was rather sassy with me when I asked how to get to our hostel. After giving me confusing and difficult answers, I finally figured out on my own what to do. When I booked our hostel at a campground in the Amsterdamse Bos, I was very excited. I had reserved a "chalet" which sounded very fancy, and the website indicated that there would be a kitchen. However, upon arrival, we noticed that the chalet was rather small from the outside. We walked in and saw a single room with eight bunk beds and a table. No kitchen, no bathroom. The hostel had a community kitchen and bath, which were a bit of a walk from our cabin. I consider this disappointment my fault as we paid very little for both nights. Our first night in the city, we walked through what we thought was the red light district. It had some vulgar stores and some "coffee shops," but overall it wasn't too horrible. However, we later happened upon the real red light district. The first thing that caught my attention was a half-dressed woman on the other side of a window, posing seductively. I saw that this spectacle was in several buildings on each side of the canal. I looked down at the ground to avoid seeing more. At one point, a man shouted at one of the guys in our group and accused him of being gay for not wanting a prostitute. After walking down the entire street, we all agreed that the experience had been depressing. It really bothers me that this goes on so openly and in such a nice historical city. Fortunately we stayed away from this area for the rest of the trip. The following days, we visited the Anne Frank house, which was very poignant, along with the Rijksmuseum. We only had an hour in the Rijks, so it was very rushed as there were several floors and a lot of ground to cover. By the time we left, I was quite ready to get back to Bonn, where everything is clean and organized. We still had some homework due the next day, however, and we all worked together on the train. Some of us continued to work in McDonald's late into the night and it was not exactly fun. However, I was happy to be back in my host home and away from Amsterdam.

Program

This past week was rather stressful with classes. We had a test in signals & systems along with the normal homework load, and the following day, I left for Amsterdam with 10 other students. The night before the exam, AIB took us to a musical concert at the university. The choir was huge along with the orchestra. Unfortunately, my lack of sleep and concern for the impending exam made it difficult to focus on the music, but it was nevertheless very impressive. I also enjoyed the opportunity to dress up for the first time on this trip. The test ended up being easier than I'd expected, though I haven't gotten my results back, so knock on wood. On Tuesday, Kristin spoke with us about the excursion to Vienna this coming week. I'm looking forward to a lighter load during the trip, but I'm also excited about the educational opportunities that it offers. My past trips to Europe have always been centered around basic political history, so it will be refreshing to learn about things more in my field of interest. I hope that I can take advantage of our free time as well.