Flowers and Bikes

For our school break, we hopped on a plane to Sciphol Airport in Amsterdam and took a hotel shuttle to a hotel in which we have stayed before, the Owl Hotel, which is famed by us for it's hot cocoa. After a day or two, we rented some bikes, to the joy of me, for I love biking, so I had a great time. We visited the fascinating but slightly gloomy Anne Frank House, lots of excellent restaurants, and beautiful flowing canals.

However, it was very dangerous on the roads, with lots of speedy bikers zooming out of corners, guided trams with their cheesy bells, and many motorcycles pretending that they are just bikes and speeding all over the cycle paths. Helmets seemed to be extinct there.

On the last day, we went on a bus which took us the the stunning Tulip Gardens. The soft aroma there was so refreshing, so honey-like. There must have been every single kind of tulip in those brilliant gardens. There was very color imaginable in there. My sister had fun in the hedge-maze that they had.

On the bus drive back to Amsterdam, the tour guide told us that 80% of the worlds tulips are grown in The Netherlands. Therefore, the stats say that the tulips in your garden are probably originally from Holland. I found that amazing.

The train to Germany was very eventful. After we had changed twice, there was a half an hour delay that caused us to miss the train that we were supposed to go on. Luckily, there was another train right across the platform that said it was for Kiel, which was where we were going to see our friends. However, we still had arrived late. Of course, then things went completely berserk. Dad had forgotten to write our friend's mobile number down, so we asked the information office to look at a phone book. That didn't help since our friends weren't in it. Dad then asked (or rather, tried to ask, in German) for an internet cafe. The man gave him the directions and off we went.

We only found a shopping mall on that tiny walk, and it didn't have any internet access. Dad asked one of the shopkeepers what the operator's number was in Germany, and Dad tried it, but that didn't work. Then Dad went down the street while the rest of us waited at the station. It turns out the guy at the information desk said "left then right" but Dad interpreted it as "right then left". So Dad had gotten the number from his email and written it down, so he called the friends. The father of the family said that his wife was there at the station. Hence, Dad and my sister and I circled round the parking lot searching for ladies with blonde hair and glasses. No one looked familiar, so Dad searched inside. Then we finally found her, realizing that her hair was now brown. She told us that she wasn't in the phone book because they lived about 10 metres outside the border...