Travelling to Amsterdam

Last year, when we finished the course and the university entrance exams, four of my friends and me travelled to Amsterdam. We went together, and some girls of our class went to Amsterdam too but on their own. We spent a whole week there, and I have to say that it was the most incredible journey of my life.

When we got to Amsterdam, we checked-in in the hotel and go for a walk around the city. We were a bit surprised with the prices there. Amsterdam is much more expensive than Spain, and we all were used to the prices we have here. But well, we had to exploit our trip, so it didn’t matter. The first day we didn’t do anything important. It wasn’t until de second day that we began visiting the museums and the sights of the city. I was impressed how many museums there are in Amsterdam. We bought a city book that gave us free entrance to some places and discounts on other things. Probably the most important museums that we visited were the Rembrandt museum and Van Gogh’s. I didn’t enjoy this part very much, but you can’t go to Amsterdam and don’t see these things, even if you don’t like them.

One day we and our other friends organized a guided tour of the major cities in the area, like Rotterdam and Delf. I didn’t like Rotterdam very much, it seemed to me that it was too industrial, it didn’t have anything beautiful. Delf, on the other hand, was very welcome. We visited there a farm and a ceramics factory. In the farm we could see how they make cheese and we also could taste it, and they also showed us how they made wood shoes that are typical from there. And in the ceramics factory we saw how they made the objects, the tools  they used, and finally some ceramic objects they had made and we could buy.

We also rented bikes one day. Guess how much it cost us? 15€ for eight hours! And it was the cheapest place we found. Other places made us pay a guarantee of 100€. Now let’s compare it with Castelló: here you can have a bike card paying 10€ a year. With this I hope you will be able to get an idea of how expensive can Amsterdam be. An anecdote about this could be that we almost had to pay an enormous amount of money because we got lost and we arrived at the last minute we had to return the bikes. After that we had to have a shower and rest for a while. You can’t imagine how fast we had to move to arrive in time…

Maybe you won’t believe me, but the last days of the trip we wanted  to go home. Well, we didn’t want to go home immediately, of course we wanted to finish our days there, but we wanted to eat some healthy food. I lost the count of how many hamburgers of the McDonalds I ate, or the Kentaky Fried Chicken, or the Wok, etc. many things, but none of them healthy. When I was arriving home I told to my mother: “Mom, please, cook me some vegetables and boiled tomatoes”. I usually hate this kind of food, but I needed it.

And that was part of my journey. I won’t tell more because I don’t want to bore anyone. Despite it was an expensive trip, I would repeat it without any doubt . I just hope this year I will go somewhere when I finish the classes.  We thought about an Interrail through southern Europe, but we still have to talk about it. I’m looking forward to it! (623)