Castro Central

Sunday, July 17, 2005:

We arrived at Gare du Nord around 9 a.m. to catch the 10 a.m. train to Amsterdam. It's crazy how much luggage some people brought on this trip. Ray and I each brought two pieces of luggage. One carry-on and one check-in, just like it said in our tour info. Some people, particularly a certain group of people, brought way more than that. For example, one girl brought 2 gigantic suitcases, a backpack, a purse, and another smaller bag. It was rumored that this particular group were headed somewhere else after the trip. Honestly, I don't give a s-h-i-t whether they were headed home or to Timbuktu. The company stated that we are to bring only 2 pieces of luggage. It's not our problem if they need to bring more things than we do. If they are planning to go somewhere after this trip they need to make prior arrangements to store their extra luggage elsewhere. Because of their inability to think of others aside from themselves we were unable to store all the luggage under the bus TWICE. This meant that a lot of the luggage had to go inside the bus and that caused a HUGE inconvenience. VERY ANNOYING!

Anyways, so we left Paris around 10 a.m. and arrived in Amsterdam at 2:05 p.m. Thank goodness the weather in Amsterdam was a lot cooler than it was in London or Paris so I was able to wear my pants and jeans a lot more. We stayed at the NH Caransa located in the Rembrandt Plein (Plaza). Unfortunately we didn't have a balcony but the room was nice. The tub was very interesting. It had four knobs on it. The bottom two hot and cold were for the actual faucet and the top two hot and cold were for the shower head. There was also a lever in between the four knobs that when turned a certain direction the stationary shower head turns on and when turned the other way the removable shower head turns on. Soooo weird! A funny story we heard that just has to be shared is about a couple of the people in our group who went to their room, opened up the door, and walk in on the previous guests having sex! Yikes! What were they still doing there, you may ask? I'm wondering what position they were in! I mean, how much did the two guys see!!

After taking a little nap we joined the group for dinner. We had to walk a bit to the restaurant, which gave us the chance to check out Amsterdam. It's a very quaint looking town. Very small with a lot of charm. At dinner we had fish, fries, veggies, wine, apple pie (no ice cream :-( ) and coffee. After dinner Ray and I roamed around the city. A really nice thing about Amsterdam is that it's small enough that if you venture too far it's really not that far. So we walked around a bit and actually ended up in Amsterdam's version of SF's Castro. Aside from the gay pride festival I have never seen that many gay men in one place! It was pretty cool!