Biker Gang Initiation-Day 42- February 20th, 2018

My first sleep in the hostel bunk bed went surprisingly well. Having an eye mask and earplugs truly goes a long way when sleeping in a twenty person room. Nick and Harry woke up early for some canal boat tour, but I wasn’t super interested and didn’t want to spend the fifteen euros. Jonathon also got up early to explore the city a bit. I rested up and just spent some time on my laptop filling out paperwork for my lease in Boston and for my internship.

Here’s a picture of our hostel room.

The hostel also served a free breakfast, so I went downstairs and had some toast with Nutella, cereal and coffee. It was all very good and was surprised to hear one of my favorite rap groups, Brockhampton, being played over the speakers. I hung out in the main area of the hostel for a bit, and researched where to rent bikes. We originally wanted to go to the Anne Frank house, but it was sold out today.

Jonathan returned pretty soon, and we went out to check out various bike shops. There is a ton of bike rental places in Amsterdam because it is the main form of transportation and bikes outnumber people 1.06 to 1. We planned to do a 24 hour rental, but realized we were leaving too early the next day to return the bikes. Jonathon and I went to three separate stops trying to find one that opened early. We had no luck and returned to the hostel.

Everyone was back now, so we discussed the bike situation and opted to do a three hour rental. We went to another nearby store and rented our bikes for nine euros. It was time to hit the streets.

Since bikes are so heavily used, every road has separate bike lanes and cars must always yield to bikes. There are also stop lights and other traffic signals for the bikes. Our first destination was the “I am Amsterdam” sign, a big tourist destination.

Here’s some pictures of us biking

We quickly reached the sign and were all enjoying our newfound freedom of the bikes. We parked and locked our bikes and headed to the sign. After having a rental bike stolen this summer, I made sure to be extra cautious locking mine up.

The sign was very crowded but we immediately started climbing it. I didn’t witness it, but Harry slipped and fell when climbing the “a”. It was really funny and he was a little bruised.

Here’s a group photo of some us on the letters.

Before leaving, I was really determined to climb on top of the “I” despite it being really tall. I couldn’t climb it on my own, so I had Sebastian help boost me up.

Success!

Afterwards we all hopped back on our bikes and headed to our next destination, the red light district. We enjoyed a nice bike ride on the way there.

When we got there, we parked our bikes and walked up the street. I guess it must be more risqué at night, because it was pretty much just a bunch of sex shops and places where you could “rent a room”. We could still cross it off our list.

We stopped for lunch in the area before going back to the bikes. I forget the name of the restaurant, but I had a pretty good burger and fries. This was the first decent burger I’ve had since being in Europe.

Here’s my burger and fries.

After lunch, we went back to our bikes and decided to just bike around for a bit. There was a big park near our hostel, so we headed there. The park was super long despite being narrow. We biked around there for about an hour and it was really relaxing.

Here’s some pictures from the park and some other random shots from biking around the city.

We left the park and stopped at a market to buy some dinner to make later. We planned to make a raclette style meal and bought potatoes, ham and cheese. They didn’t have raclette so we settled for cheddar.

We returned the bikes to the shop, then brought the food back to the hostel. We were all pretty exhausted and spent about two hours relaxing. I used this time to talk on the phone with my friend Ivy and facetime my brother. Jonathon and Harry went downstairs to make dinner. We have been taking turns cooking and cleaning.

The dinner ended up working out exactly as expected and was very filling. We even had a few potatoes left over. We have complimented the meal with a nice pitcher of beer from the hostel bar. The beer was a brand called Juliper and was really good.

After dinner, I helped clean up our plates and pots.

My friends met some guy named Alex from California this morning in the hostel. They said he was very cool and we invited him to come out with us tonight. Kyle met up with us and we went to some bar where we could get 15 shots for 20 euros. Talk about a deal.

The rest of night was pretty typical, we bar hopped and danced a lot. We also got some more late night pizza that was really good. Unlike Stockholm, everything was actually open at night, despite it being a tuesday.

We ended the night at our hostel bar, where we played some pool for a bit.

We called it a night around twelve because we had to get up early for out flight the next day.