The Netherlands: A journey to get some Space Cakes

There we were, standing in the Gare du Nord in Paris, watching our train to the Netherlands pull away from the platform 10 minutes early.

We stood there, with the other passengers who missed the train, as well as some of the staff, in disbelief as we watched the choochoo go on by.

What's even stranger.....We thought that would be the weirdest part of our day.

So we went to the ticket counter, and told them the train left early and we couldn't get on. We managed to Debbie down the clerk to comp our later tickets, and so we had a couple hours to kill in the train station as we awaited our next train.

So

We slept.

On the dirty grungy floor we took comfort. Even the homeless people were looking at us strangely as we sprawled out and waited. For about 2 hours we slept like stray dogs on the concrete...when all of a sudden, we were awakened by a bunch of seemingly unconcerned police men trying to clear everyone out of our area. We all stood around confused for a few moments until we heard an explosion...then saw everyone running. In my panicked state, all I could think of is "If me and mary get blown up on our first full day together my mom is going to be so mad at me." Yet, upon further inspection we noticed that everyone was merely running back to their original seats. Obviously, I was befuddled.

I approached a police officer, who was smoking a pipe, and asked what happened. He explained to me the protocol when a bag is found left in the station, how they blow it up. No big thang....

Finally we got on the train.

We got off in Rotterdam to be greeted by two of our favorite Hollanders...Sander and Rozie!!! We had met them in Turkey and were pumped to spend some time with them on their home turf!!! Rozie had made us a delicious dinner, and we spent the night with some celebrity gossip and rotterdam partying!!! it was awesome!

the next day we awoke to go out with our wonderfully tall and fantastic tour guide Sander. We explored Delft, Leiden and Amsterdam with him, and it was so awesome. Seriously, I want to live in Leiden now!

Of course Amsterdam was ridiculous. We walked through the red light district, and even got a complimentary butt-slap by one of the prostitutes. We went to Anne Franks house, which was a really cool experience.....but we only had a few hours left before we caught a plane to Belfast, so we decided to stop in a nice dutch coffee shop and by some pastries that would..ahem..relax our taste buds...

We said goodbye to Sander :(, and boarded our plane to the next destination...Belfast...