Amsterdam: night buses, hippies, & waffles

So I made it back in one piece from Amsterdam. The trip there was interesting: I woke up at 3 am to take the 4:10 am night bus from Gare Montparnasse to Charles de Gaulle airport for the first flight out of Paris to Amsterdam at 6:50 am. The bus-conversation with the South American grad student studying in Madrid with a one-night layover in Paris was congenial.
When we finally get to the Amsterdam, we have to take a train to the metro, the metro to the end, and then wait for the shuttle (aka 70s van) from Lucky Lake Hostel to pick us up and take us 15 minutes to the hippie trailer park that is supposed to be a hostel. The hostel, which is the cheapest-and the farthest from downtown, apparently-on hostelworld.com, has individual caravans (which sounds cool on the website), paper maché aligators and hippos hanging around the hammocks on the grass, and lots of open space with no lake in sight where one can do anything but experience dowtown Amsterdam.


After nearly 11 hours of travel, we finally get the beanie-wearing, scraggly-beard sporting, blue-eyed hippie to take us back to the metro station in the diesel van which was once filled with regular and thus had to be emptied by aforementioned hippie, using only his mouth and a bucket.
Once we finally do get into the city, however, the wait has been worth it. The city itself reminds me a bit of San Francisco, with its lanky and lean, squished-together brick buildings. Fall leaves drip from the wet trees among the thousands of rusting green, yellow, and blue bikes propped on corners, thrown among shrubs, and otherwise lining the streets. The intricate system of canals is disorienting, but it makes a boat tour well worth our euros, as does the Van Gogh Museum and the Heinken Experience, a specialty museum with complimentary beer samples.

Amsterdam is quaint. The people are friendly and helpful, and they actually hold conversations on the Metro. It is lively at all times of the day, and there is always a museum to be found to peruse. I was not the only blonde within 500 feet. The local Febo distributes the fastest fast-food I have yet seen: cheesburgers and fried eggroll-like meat-concotions in little windows you pay to open like a newspaper stand (and their fries are incredible). You do not really need a ticket to ride the Metro, as the admins are pretty lax, which helps when you have left yours in the back pocket of your other jeans, a 2-euro, 15-min shuttle ride away at the lake of the lucky.

Overall, the weekend was a success, despite the minor location setbacks, and I would definitely go back for another visit to the city where liverwurst sandwiches are a traditional treat (and only 2.20 euro) and Canadian expatriats-turned hippies toast packaged-waffles for you in a tent for breakfast. :)


*Check out my Amsterdam photos at: http://picasaweb.google.com/maggiemagee1/Amsterdam?authkey=OfuvF6ki_Ws&pli=1