Panic Posting Part 2: Amsterdam

 The weekend of Karneval, a small group of us went to see Amsterdam. Because of Karneval, travel was kind of crazy. The trip there went perfectly fine. There's a Subway (the sandwich place) next to the Hauptbahnhof (main station for whoever in my vast collection of readers didn't know). There's also a subway (public transportation) there too. Anyway, I ate my Subway sandwich and then went and got on the train to Amsterdam. It was indirect, and one of the stops was in Cologne (using the American spelling because I can't find the two little dots that go above the o in Koln). We transferred across only a few platforms, and it really wasn't bad at this point (yes I'm foreshadowing). The travels continued just fine, and I thoroughly enjoyed it because I absolutely love trains. We arrived in Amsterdam around 10 at night, found the public transportation ticket booth, managed to purchase our tickets after a short ordeal because the machine was apparently not wanting to do any work that night. We took the tram to the hostel. We went to the room. We slept.The next morning, our group woke up, traveled over to downtown, and proceeded to walk around. We saw the Body Works museum exhibit, with the plasticized cadaver parts. Not really a traditional Amsterdam landmark, but it was interesting. Then we ate some really good pancakes (mine had ham, brie and honey, and yes it was as good as it sounds). We met up with the others, walked around a lot more, had dinner, then retreated home. It wasn't a particularly eventful day, and I didn't see the Anne Frank house, but there was a huge line and I was content wandering around and just looking at buildings/ the water. Maybe I'm just easily amused. The next day, we saw the big Amsterdam letters that everyone takes pictures by, walked by some very pretty museums but didn't go in, and did a little bit of souvenir perusing. Again, not particularly interesting, but I enjoyed myself. It was then time to go home. The trip was fine, until Cologne. Oh Cologne. Remember 1/3 of a paragraph ago I said it was fine on the way there? Well it was definitely not fine on the way back. Our train to Bonn was delayed by 90 minutes (or 70, I can't remember). It was around 11pm at this point. There's vomit and other questionable fluids all around. There's people everywhere who are clearly having way more fun than me. We tried to read the time tables to find another train home but the ones that we thought would be there were not. We went outside and tried to flag a taxi, but they wouldn't even slow down. After 90 (or 70) minutes of this nonsense, the original train finally came. It was so crowded on the platform trying to get through the doors, I was sure somebody would fall in the gap or there would be some kind of horrible incident. I somehow managed to get a seat, but the train was completely packed. After one stop we stayed for around 15 minutes because the conductor was saying over the speaker that we were too full but nobody got off. I guess he gave up, because we eventually arrived in Bonn. I would rate that as my second least favorite transportation story (yes, foreshadowing again).

 Overall, I'm glad I went to Amsterdam. I really liked walking around it, but again, I didn't really do anything noteworthy. I guess that's just the way trips go sometimes.