Jul 21, 06 | England to Netherland

I arrived 6pm around at the Stansted Airport about an hour outside of London. I then had to stand in line for about an hour and a half in order to get through customs. After that I was a bit worried. I had not had time to book a hostel, so finding one would be tricky. I went to talk to the girl at the information help desk. She was a little too helpful. First she told me the wrong exchange rate (in fact the opposite. I even made her repeat it for me), then she told me every hostel and budget hotel in central London was full due to some motor event. So, long story short, I booked for one night a very nice hotel room right next to the tower of London. And oh it was nice, but oh it was pricey. (pictures coming in the near future)

The next morning I was very touristy and saw pretty much all the sites on the Tour of London board game. I quickly found out that London is the most expensive city I visited, being that the pound is about twice the dollar.

In the afternoon I hopped on the train to Brussels, went through the chunnel, and switched to a train headed to Rotterdam. I had planned to stay the night at Rotterdam since I did not start the program until the following afternoon. However, I had a similar problem that I had in London. So when I got off the train at 10pm, I asked a couple people about hostels. They didn’t know or said they didn’t live there, so I hopped back on a train headed to Utrecht. I arrived in Utrecht at 12:30am. Hoping to avoid the same problem there, I started talking to Dutch guy next to me hoping to eventually pry the name of a hostel out of him. This was very easy since apparently he had lived in Utrecht for eight years and actually offered the information before I even asked. The help desk lady here was much more helpful and pointed me to the hostel.

I had made it. I was in tact. I was finally here.

That night I slept very well until about 1 in the afternoon, after which I enjoyed the FREE FOOD offered by the hostel. At about 3 in the afternoon I walked to the international summer school office and checked in.

(to be continued..)

On another note, I have recently discovered that the kitchen one hall down from my own has a stray wireless signal. I am currently using it and will probably do so as long as it exists. Thus, I should finally be able to upload some pictures, hopefully.