Foreign Languages are Hard!

So my posts were supposed to start over two weeks ago!!! But unfortunately blogspot.com was in Croatian and then in Italian, so I finally had time tonight to sit down and change the language back to english! My two years of studying Italian didn't really help me this time...

I'm going to start catching up on my blogging by posting a description of each day of my travels in Croatia and Italy since almost three weeks is too much to cover in one post! I will post a few times a day so I don't have to skip anything :)

Day 1 of My European Journey (8/20/11)
Julia Ticus and I left for Europe on August 19th, 2011. We arrived on the morning of August 20th in Amsterdam. Since we had about a 6 hour layover, we decided to check our hand luggage and take the train from the Airport into the city. It was so easy and took only about 20 minutes. Julia kept commenting on how grown up we were for exploring another country all by ourselves!

We found a place to rent bikes right next to the train station and took two red one speeds around Amsterdam for three hours. We didn't go to any museums or find anything that required much brain activity because we hadn't slept much (or at all) on the plane over. After exploring the bridges, taking pictures of cute apartment buildings, and getting honked at by a giant bus we stopped at a market that we found. There were fruits, vegetables, cheeses, breads, meats, fish, crafts, antiques, rugs, old books, jewelry, and more! I bought an interesting pair of drop down earrings and Julia got some fruit.

We looked around the market for about an hour, then started off to find a cheap restaurant away from the square. We found this strange bar with outdoor seating that wasn't full of people already and had an iced tea to start. This strange Turkish guy that worked there was being very weird to us and dancing around and singing and saying strange things too. Eventually he took our order and left us alone. I had the most AMAZING sandwich ever: hunks of brie cheese, toasted walnuts, chicken breast, and honey on thick, Turkish bread. It was SO good! Julia's guacamole and chicken sandwich didn't look as good...

We wandered the streets back to our locked up bikes and rode back to the train station with plenty of time to get back to the airport for our flight to Split, Croatia. We decided to take the earlier train that had two stops before the airport instead of the 10 minute later non-stop train to the airport. Bad decision. The slow train "broke down" at the second stop it took. "Broke down" as in ONE door on ONE car wouldn't quite close the last 2 inches!!! So we sat on the train blocking other trains from getting by for 45 minutes! We had no idea what was going on because the announcements were in Dutch and the people around us were not Dutch either. Then when the "broken" train left, the fast train went by the stop even though there were tons of people trying to catch flights at the airport!!! We finally got on another train, ran to our hand luggage locker and high tailed it to our gate. Of course the plane was still being cleaned and we looked like fools running through security, but at least we made it and even had time to cool off before boarding!

We had to take an hour long bus from the airport to Split and walk up a big hill to our hostel which was two floors up in an apartment building! With my GIANT backpack and 3 handbags I looked and felt like a pack mule. The hostel's air conditioning felt so great and there were comfortable beds too :) Julia and I went out to look for a slice of pizza and the pizza man "welcomed" us to Croatia with a free shot of liquor... After we took it and almost died because it was so gross, he told us that we now knew what not to order at the bars. He gave us the worst liquor in Croatia!! That was a mean welcome!

We met the rest of the people staying in our hostel and talked in the mini kitchen about our plans for the night and the next few days. Most people stayed out but Julia and I stayed and talked to this boy Stewart before going to bed. We planned to get up early and go to the beach or the national forest one hour north depending on how tired we were. I hadn't slept a wink in over 36 hours!