I'm not sure how much I elaborated on mine and Elisabeth's relationship on my earlier posts when I was in Denmark with her, so here I go. We'll start at the beginning, on June 5, 1989 when she was born. Three days later, in another city, I was born. Six months later, her family moved across the street from mine in Toledo, Ohio. We became best friends, to the greatest extent that babies can, but were tragically seperated four years later when my family moved to Indiana. We visited twice a summer til we moved farther away, to South Carolina, at which point we started to spend about 2 weeks together once a year. BUT, we changed the course of bestfriendship history this year by not only hanging out in Denmark, but also meeting up in Amsterdam!
Day (Night) 1
We met up in the airport and took a train into the city. The walk to the hostel wasn't long and was facilitated by a map printing machine at the station. You type in a street and it highlights the directions on a map, amazing! Turned out our hostel was in the redlight district. Wait...our Christian hostel was in the redlight district. We found it pretty easily, checked in, dropped our stuff off, and headed out to explore. Evidently midnight isn't the best time to explore Amsterdam; the streets were well-lit and crowded enough for us to feel safe, but not to protect us from creepy comments, like the guy at a kebab stand who asked "Are you looking for me?" No, in fact, we are not. Nor were we interested in answering another guy's question of where we were from. Nor did we have a lighter or want to join some guy and his friend for drinks. We did politely tell that one that we were Canadian though when he asked, he was more respectful, but still creepy.
Amidst some jerks, we still had a good time because we got to go on a ferris wheel! We'd wanted to in Copenhagen, but it was about the equivalent of $16 there. And I bought a chocolate waffle! My anger at it surprisingly costing 4.50 euro abated as soon as I tasted it, absolutely delicious. We got to work on some planning when we got back to the hostel and ended up making friends with the night deskman, he even gave us bowls of ice cream! He's Australian, working at the hostel for a few months, and I think enjoyed some company on his 11pm to 8 am shift. He made us think of our relationship differently when he pointed out that even though we've been friends for nearly 20 (!) years, we've barely seen each other in person. We're just such good communicators that that hardly matters!
We have a thing for maps.
Elisabeth and I have always thought of sleep as a waste of time when we're together, so we slept for 4 hours, ate breakfast at the hostel, and ran off of excitement to be together and coffee for the rest of the day.
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