October 23 - 28: Hamburg to Amsterdam to Paris to Milano

Wow! A lot has happened in the last week!

So, our stay with Zoe was really fun. Anton and I got to meet her friends Tara and Runa, who we went out to a bar with after eating some falafel on our second night there. The next morning we took off for the train station at about 10am, and eventually caught a 12:46pm train to Osnabruek, then waited 1.5 hours for another train for Amsterdam that we boarded at 3:50pm. We arrived in Amsterdam after dark and wandered around the streets trying to find a hostel, and some really nice people helped direct us to a place to stay. The first place we stayed was a £40 hostel and we had to sleep on bunkbeds in a tiny flourescent-lit room on the third floor of a creepy, old building. It felt like a jail cell, but it was all we could get, so we dropped off our things and went out and had some drinks, then found our way over to the Sex Museum, which was very funny to say the least.

The next day, the 24th, we checked out of our dirty, creepy hostel and walked around until we found another place to stay called the Rainbow Palace Hotel (yeah, really.) The guys running the place were really nice and we were able to get our own room with a real bed! We walked around the streets all day, admiring the prostitutes in the windows and stopping in lots of coffee shops before making our way over to the Anne Frank museum (which is actually her old hiding place where she wrote her diary.) It was kind of depressing being inside the room she had lived in, but all the tourists crowding the room kind of took all the feeling out of it. After that, we had some drinks then went back to our room and watched One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest on TV and went to sleep.

On the 25th we woke up around 10am and walked over to the train station, where we got on a 11:26am train for Brussels. From Brussels we made a transfer to another train and were able tyo arrive in Paris around 5pm. We took a cab to a hotel we had read about in our Europe On A Shoestring book called Hotel Bonnejour. The man and woman who ran the building were very nice and were able to get us a room without a reservation. The first night, our room was on the first floor up one set of steep spiral stairs that felt like they would cave in at any minute. We dropped off our stuff, then went out looking for food and found some greasy chinese noodles and spring rolls. Then we walked around and found some wine (only £2 - £3!!) and went back to our hotel room and drank and drew pictures all night.

The next day, the 26th, we woke up and had to switch hotel rooms, so we moved our stuff out into the lobby, then walked all over town. It just so happened that my bank card stopped working (I would later find out that I had recieved a new card, which was in my wallet, but I hadnt activated it yet and was stupidly oblivious to its existence...) So Anton and I spent most of the day stressing out about what we were going to do about money and trying to figure out how to atleast get some food or something. Finally I called my Dad, and he was able to talk to Wells Fargo (since I had no way to contact them) and he helped me activate my card and have access to my money again. While we were waiting for my card to work, I found £40 in my wallet I had gotten out the day before and we celebrated by eating a baguette and hummus (I think we ate that 3 times while in Paris) as well as some badly needed groceries. When we finally got our new hotel room at 3:30pm, we put our things away (in our new room up 4 flights of stairs,) ate some more bread and hummus, then took a subway over to the Eiffel Tower. We got off at the wrong stop, but it was nice because we were able to walk along the river and enjoy the city at night. It was very, very beautiful. The Eiffel Tower was really amazing and was way bigger than I had anticipated. We even took an elevator to the top of it! I was kind of scared because Im afraid of heights, but the view was just incredible. After that, we took the subway back and ate some avocado and cucumber maki and a french-fry filled pita before going to bed.

The 27th we woke up and checked out of our hotel at 11am and Anton and I tried to call his parents to let them know we were on our way to Italy, but they werent at their phone. Then got a cab ride with the rudest cab driver I have ever met. He looked like Danny Devito on a bad day, and had a terrible attitude problem, refusing to allow me to bring my shoulder bag with me in the car and getting offended about everything. He then added a baggage fee for £2 at the end of the ride, claiming he had helped us with out baggage, which he absolutely did not. He was the worst person we met on this trip so far (besides a ticket lady on one of the French trains who yelled at Anton for putting his feet on a little side shelf thing next to our seats, then asked him if he wanted to "get down and lick it clean") Anyway, after finally making it to the station, Anton realized that he had forgotten his wallet at the hotel, so I waited at the station with the bags and he went back and got his wallet, then we got in a really long line for train tickets, only to find out that the soonest we could get anywhere in Italy would be the next morning at 7am. We had already checked out of our room and had all our stuff ready to go, so we decided to just try to stay awake at the train station all night instead of looking for a place to sleep. It was okay at first, because we went out and walked around and even went to a movie (This Is England, about the skinhead movement in England, a really good movie) and walked around, then ate a huge meal of Indian food. We got back to the train station around 10pm and waited and waited, then decided to try to make our way over to a different station, which is where we would have to leave in the morning. That turned into a huge fiasco, because the subway trains ran on a different schedule at night and we ended up getting dropped off outside in the middle of nowhere where we had to wait about an hour for a return train to the station we came from. When we got back to it, we sat around, then walked around trying to stay busy and trying not to freeze (the station was partly open to the outside) until security guards tried to rudely kick us out. We still hung around and finally they allowed us along with a group of other travellers to sleep in the waiting area room, which was warm and relatively comfortable, for sleeping on the floor. This morning we woke up at 6am and got on our train and after 8 hours on the train have finally arrived in Milano. Now we have to wait two more hours for our next train to Florence, where we will find a hotel and meet up with Antons parents tomorrow.

Whew!!