It was about the time we arrived in Amsterdam Centraal Station...
...that our problems began to arise. First of all, I had done a little too much shopping in London, and my backpack was pretty heavy by now, with a lot of stuff that really wasn't necessary for the rest of the journey. Which is fine if you're on a proper vacation, but really sucks if you're backpacking. But this proved to be a small problem in the face of what happened next. At the station, while we were trying to figure out where we were going to stay, I guess we didn't pay enough attention to our stuff, because one of Matt's bags was stolen from the pile. Just our luck that it had to be the one containing all our plane tickets, all our rail passes, and Matthew's passport, amongst other personal items. To put it quite frankly, we flipped out. After the police report, the search through lost and found, the dejected phone calls home, we finally settled on a cheap hotel near the train station, too depressed to find a hostel with space for 3 rapidly-becoming-regretful would-be backpackers.
In the meantime, being stuck in amsterdam indefinitely (turned out to be a week in the end), we tried to make good use of our time, walking around and seeing the sights. Amsterdam is really a great place, there's so much to do and see, and it's full of other young people, and backpackers from everywhere. Plus, you can pretty much get by speaking English.
Top left: Matt and Jaik at the Dam Square, which is a nice open space good for just hanging out and watching people.
Top middle: Matt and me at some random fountain in some random park somewhere in Amsterdam.
Top right: Me, myself, and a whole shitload of really cool graffiti. (don't ask me what it says, it's in Dutch)
Bottom left: This is us, STOPped on your journey by circumstance, inexperience and carelessness. *sigh*
Bottom middle: Me at the Vondelpark, which is a really nice, big-ass park in the South part of the city.
Bottom right: This is me after successfully stealing a gondola in one of the canals in the middle of the night. Of course, having nowhere to take it,
I left it where it was. But it's mine now.
Amsterdam is a really great place, and one of the reasons for this is that they actually have museums that are cool to check out. I'm not talking about those stupid galleries full of paintings by dead people, or with insane amounts of history or culture stuffed into them. No, Amsterdam has some very different museums.
Here's us at the Cannabis College in a room where they just grow weed. Yup, those plants behind us are marijuana plants. *wink*
And then on the right, that's us with the bike outside the Hash & Marijuana Museum.
And then there's the Sex Museum (or the Seksmuseum, as they call it there). 'Nuff said.
And the Tattoo Museum, and the Magic Mushroom Gallery. Like I said, Amsterdam is cool. :)
After a couple of days staying at the hotel, we decided we'd pretty much gotten over the shittiness of our situation, and decided that we should go find a hostel to stay in. despite Matthew's protests that he wanted us to have our "own bathroom" to come home to. So we went to this place called Bob's Youth Hostel, which was near the train station, full of young people, and offered beds in a room with 17 other people and breakfast for $30 gilders a night. I'll never forget waking up in the morning and going downstairs only to be greeted with the smell of breakfast cooking, coffee brewing and weed being smoked every single morning.
Here's me with the great people at Bob's.
Other cool stuff they have in Amsterdam:
the Statue of No Liberty, outside of the Reiksmuseum (i think I got the spelling right...),
and this guy who rode a bike around with a piano attached to it, and stopped to play.
We gave him some money. A piano-bike is something I've never seen.
On the morning of our last day in Amsterdam, we were finally able to go to the Singapore Consulate in Rotterdam to go pick up Matthew's travel document which would allow us to continue with our journey. We were completely recovered from our incident by this time, feeling confident after coming through a tough situation that we felt we handled pretty well. We had gotten replacement plane tickets from the MAS (Malaysian Air Systems) office, and bought new rail passes which we would later claim insurance for. Here's Matthew outside the Singapore Consulate in Rotterdam with his brand new travel document:
This was also the morning of July 8th, the day of the Love Parade. We hopped on a train and headed straight for Berlin.