Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Sweat, Swank, and Technological Meltdown


While lost, we wandered on to this beautiful street. I love all the flowers!

Don't ask us how this car even got stuck on the tram tracks in the first place. We laughed when we saw that the driver was Asian. Stereotypes are alive and well in Europe.

Amsterdam has more canals than Venice. They are so beautiful.

The fashion hotel has many random mannequins.

Our celebration dinner at Luden. Adam's presentation was a success!!

Adam all decked out for the conference. (That's the entry way of our hotel room.)



VU University, where the International Forensic Linguistics Conference is being held.

The hotel's restaurant. I'm in design HEAVEN!!

Our room that we love—pretty good for under a hundred dollars.

Hotel lobby, I love the random pink man.

We finally arrive at The Golden Tulip Fashion Hotel. Adam was great with all the luggage. He has lugged it all for miles.


We are here in Amsterdam and finally have access to the internet! Here is our story...

We left Paris by train to Amsterdam. I carried the luggage for hours, through subways, narrow gates, crowds, and stairs. By the time we boarded the train, I was dripping with sweat. It was so uncomfortable. I'm sure that the people sitting across from us were almost as grossed out as I was. We rode the train through the countryside, arriving in Amsterdam, then taking the public tram to our hotel, which was amazing! Brand new and very, very trendy. We got such a sweet deal!

However, since it opened three days before our check in, things weren't exactly working properly. Or, at all. In fact, we had no internet, no phone, no alarm clock, and no wake up call. It took them forever to fix the internet, until right now actually, and the phones only work to call the front desk. So the morning of my presentation, with the black out curtains drawn tight, I woke up thinking it was about 7am. I freaked out when I found out it was ten thirty and didn't arrive at the university until eleven thirty—two hours late! Luckily, all was okay and the presentation was a great success.

With all of the issues, I think the hotel staff has seen enough of us. They have a look of dread when they see us approaching the front desk. Luckily they offered us a free dinner, so hopefully it doesn't show up on our bill. We'll see...

Otherwise Amsterdam has been great. We are travel pros, traveling by every means except hovercraft: trains, planes, cabs, metros, busses, trams, and lots of walking. Tomorrow we will head to some museums and see some sights. It should be great.

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