11/21/04

Last night ws a partic ularly cold night. We had frost and ce all over the outside of our tent when we got in and when we got out. We keep all our backpacks and stuff we don't want to get wet in plastc garbage bags and all of those bags were covered in ice too we decided to sleep in. Once we roused ourselves, we biked into Amsterda to go to the Van Gogh Museum. as lon as we are here we figured we might as well keep doing all the touristy activities we can It was great. I think we both liked it better then the Riks Museum. Befor we went into the museum, we came upon a No violence free concert going on in the square/park right next to the Van Gogh museum. It was really cool and the music was good too. Some hip-hop,pop/rock, some reggae. No one pr3eformed that I recognized but they all seemed like Dutch performers. After this and the museum we gathered up our bikes and rode to find dinner. We ended up finding and albert heijn and getting groceries. It is less convenient to eat this way because we e8ither have to eat outside(in the cold and rain most of the time) or find a place o make our food and eat it. But it is so much cheaper and the food is always good. After we went to Abrazas and got ouselves some hot drinks and played cards we met a group of younger girls from Frankfurt Germany and they played kings on the corners with us. It was interesting because not all of them spoke engl8ish and I couldn't explain every word of the directions in german but we got along just fine :) My germen was better then I thought it would be. Shortly after the german girls split, our friend from the hostel, the hungarian girl Amese, showed up with her boyfriend who had come into town the day before to meet her. They are very fun people! They are trying to talk us into ghoing to Hungary and stay with them and they say they will sho us around. We are thinking about it but first we just have to get out of Amsterdam and go from there. We played lucky bastard with them for a couple of hours I think. Good time. We left Abrazas the same time as Aemese and her boyfriend. Around 1050PM and we came out, we could tell that somthing was not quite right with our bikes. As we got closer in the dark alley, where our bikes had been double kryptonite locked to eath other on both wheels and the frame, we saw that both lock and be cut and Angie's bike was GONE. Stolen. Both uf us were devasteated, but because we have had sort of a hard time and were so tired we could show no emotion at the moment. They took the tools and Caleb's bike light but they left Caleb's bike. At least they \left us with a way to get home. We rode Dutch style back to the campground with Caleb driving and myself riding on the panner.
Well that pretty much changes our trip plan. Right now we are trying to find another way to travel wthat will be financally feasible for us. Dissapointment in the dutch human race is high in this moment. Needless to say we are both , and I never thought I could say htis, ready to be out of Amstedam and not come back for a long, long time. Any good ideas let us know