Our Study Abroad program was nice enough to not only take us across seas to Ireland, but also give us a week off to ourselves to check out Europe all by ourselves. Bobby Mandel and myself decided to get together and be travel buddies for this one, because we seem to have similar tastes, travel styles, and get along pretty well. Just before I wrote the last post (early October) we decided to look into where we could go for cheap that looks appetizing and nice to our wallets. We landed on a few different cities: Venice, Brussels (briefly), and Amsterdam. It was settled, we bought some Ryan air tickets, train tickets, and an Aer Lingus ticket and proceeded to seek out some accommodations for sleeping in each city. The date rolled along and we set sail on our journey.

We walked around Dublin for a night waiting for our plane, slept in a 7 Euro hostel, almost had our bags stolen while we slept (truly) and woke up by 3:30am to await our early flight to Venice. Several cups of coffee later our sketchy Ryan air flight took off and landed in Venice, where neither of us spoke the language, nor knew how to actually get onto the “island” of Venice. We followed some promising signs and were herded onto a bus that may or may not get us there. We did however dismount the bus to find a delightfully old, car-less floating (sort of) city with more canals than one can imagine. We found out the hostel we booked was across the larger canal so we decided to spend the day on the main part of Venice with our bags and just check out the city as much as possible before checking in. We saw as much as possible: San Marco, Da Vinci exhibits, naval exhibits, and just wandered and found little nooks and crannies of the city. We went to find our hostel and food before getting a good rest before another day of wandering. Today we wanted to see only a few more things (small city) and by about 12pm we decided we saw a lot of the things we liked on the map… so we proceeded to eat as much pizza and drink as much wine as we could for the remainder of the day. We ate and drank then walked around to find more random things, rinse and repeat. We had another early flight out to Brussels so we hit the hay by about 10pm.

We landed in Brussels airport and found the area quite pretty because it was in the middle of no where surrounded by almost nothing. We again took a bus into the City and quickly realized that all of Brussels was gray and gross. We promptly walked into the train station to get food and wait for a way into Amsterdam.

Arriving in Amsterdam from Brussels is like walking into a palace after spending years living in a box. The town is clean, gorgeously covered in red-brick buildings, extremely clean canals and some extremely delightful people. Our hostel was very friendly, we found a bar and hang out area in the basement and our room was towards the top of the thin building. Bobby and I forgot that we took the cheapest available bed which landed us in a full-size bed for both of us. We decided to cuddle instead of pay the extra 10 Euro a piece for our own beds. It was okay though because the Canadian sisters below us just made fun of us the entire time. Those same Canadian sisters actually became some good friends of ours. Us four split the making of a good soup and salad with some wine. They wanted to walk around town to see it at night and finally had some boys to take them (they thought it unsafe with just two girls). We walked around town, took some goofy pictures then headed back to the hostel. The morning after we all hung out we were parting ways so we made sure we could all find each other on Facebook and we went our separate paths.

We found, upon returning to the Park Lodge, that it had become our home. We plopped down on our beds and unpacked and felt like the traveling had ended, which in a way it had, but we realized that those cottages had become somewhere we wanted to return to, it was an odd feeling to realize this.