I definitely have to say that I have become a better traveler over the past several weeks. I've learned to more effectively handle airports, public transportation and foreign grocery stores. However, there are some things that you just can't predict and I still, obviously, have a lot to learn. I want to make it clear that I have loved all of my traveling experiences this far, so don't get me wrong. However, London has taught me a very important lesson that, although tons of things can go wrong, you can still have a great trip. Now, I made a previous post about how great London was, so please refer to that if you want to hear about the touristy stuff. This post is dedicated to describing all the surprises that we encountered when working through the logistics of London. They did not diminish our experience in the least. In fact, I think they made the trip that much more memorable, but they were definitely not what we had bargained for. The good news is it all worked out and we had a great time!
It all started when Charlotte and I took a different flight from Carolyn to London because we had Thursday classes and she had a friend in London whose birthday party she wanted to attend. Thursday morning the place where we were planning on staying fell through and we had to book a last minute hostel that still had space. We chose the cheapest one and marked where we needed to get off on our subway map that we printed out before we left. It wasn't until after booking it that we read the customer comments mentioning bed bugs.
Amsterdam Airport was fine and then we got rejected at our first attempt through customs in London because we didn't provide enough information about where we would be staying during our visit. The joke was on that guy though because we had no better idea of where we were staying than he did. :) We finally got past the border and waited a while for our bus to the city. We were scolded for standing in the wrong spot to wait but the ride to the city was perfectly painless.
When we got dropped off at the station in London, we wandered around the train station for a good twenty or so minutes before we could find the entrance into the underground station. The perfectly lovely woman at the counter was oh so accommodating and didn't make things at all complicated for us. Not true. But she did tell us to buy the more expensive tickets that would allow us to get on the subway right away and use it all day, since it was midnight at that point. The only problem was the more expensive ticket that she made us buy wouldn't let us through the gate because, come to find out, it didn't start until 4:00 in the morning. The guy let us through, just as the last train to where we wanted to go was pulling out of the station without us.
That plan was shot so we hopped on the next one to get closer to where we wanted to go. Of course we couldn't get out of that station without the generosity of the guy at the gate to let us out even though we had the wrong tickets. He directed us to the bus station and said we could buy another ticket (since ours weren't working) to where we wanted to go. Two and a half hours later, we finally gave up on the bus that the two drunk girls at the bus stop who drew all over our map said would take us where we wanted to go and broke down to get a taxi. 14 pounds, and a lost cab driver later, we finally ended up at the hostel with the bedbugs. At that point it was almost 4:00am, the golden hour that our tickets would actually start working. When we went to pay the hostel the guy said "what the heck is this money, I've never seen it before, I can't accept it." Well, I took out pounds from an ATM in Scotland, and, although the whole UK uses pounds, each country has a slightly different variation that the other countries are often hesitant to accept. A fact that was reinforced every time we tried to pay for something all
weekend. This guy just flat out refused it.
The hostel was booked for the next two nights so after a quick trip on the computer to book the next cheapest hostel we could find on the other side of the city, we went to bed on mattresses that felt like metal grates. I think I might still have the imprints of the springs in my skin, but my skin was only a little itchy in the morning. After a few hours of sleep we tried to hop on the subway, only to find out the awesome passes that the lady sold us still didn't work and had to be personally let in and out of every station.
We spent a great day in the city and when we went to head out to our new hostel that evening we realized it was in a zone further than our passes for the subway permitted. We had no idea how to get there besides on the subway and, although with the way our luck was going we should have known better, decided to chance it and play dumb if we got questioned about the zones. Well, they noticed. But the guy was really nice and let us out. The other guy at the ticket counter actually did us a favor too and let us upgrade our passes for that day and the next day to include the new zone, and actually scan ourselves through the gates.
We found the hostel with no problem only to realize we booked for Saturday and Sunday, instead of Friday and Saturday. Fortunately, there was still space for that night. It was however in a room that was about the size of an SUV with 21 beds in it. The bunks were 3 levels high! It gets really hot in a room with that many people in it in the middle of the night. There were about twenty people who lived in the hostel full time and they recognize that we were the newbies. I can't imagine living in a hostel full time but they all seemed to get a kick out of it and enjoyed their parties in the basement.
The next day was a great day too but we went to bed about midnight because we had to leave at 3:30am to get on a bus to go to the city center to walk to another bus stop to bus to the airport. The only problem was that it was daylight savings time so we lost an hour. I set my alarm that was still set on the Netherlands time and verified that it matched my watch so that I would be ok with the time change. Charlotte set her phone but it switched times automatically and woke her up an hour early. She had to text me to wake me up because she didn't remember the code to get back into the room and was stuck in the hallway. Because of the confusion, and since I was already woken up, we only slept an hour and waited around in the hostel until we had to get to the bus stop.
There was some difficulty finding the second bus station that was to take us to the airport but we made it just in time. At the airport we got through security fairly fine and got into Amsterdam without a problem. There was apparently construction on the tracks to the routes were being diverted a little bit. Between the announcements in Dutch and the lack of labeling on the trains, we ended up on the wrong train that we didn't have tickets for that went into downtown Amsterdam. Not a huge problem, we just had to switch stations and add more time to our travel.
Finally, we got home that day after not sleeping in forever and I collapsed into my bed planning on taking a quick nap before I started doing homework, only to have my next door neighbor start practicing trombone.
I swear, I loved London, and the problem that we had (and I'm not positive that this was all of them) only made the experience more memorable. It's just that, when traveling, especially the way we do it, we have learned that we need to expect the unexpected.
