Alive and Sweaty

Greetings from the other side of the Atlantic!

We're now safely ensconced in Amsterdam, and our flight went by largely without incident. We landed, used an ATM, and found our campsite with no major problems. (Aren't you all so proud?) Everything was feeling cool and groovy -- even the air smelled fresher as we trekked out to our camping pitch.

Really fresh, in fact -- almost suspiciously so...

Sort of like when I'm in the shower, and I grab a bottle of Pert Plus and squeeze out a dollop, only this smelled like a whole lot more than a dollop.

Which, of course, it was.

A whole bottle, to be precise, and it had exploded all over the inside of my pack. I had luckily packed it in a seperate section, apart from clothing and important documents, but had mysteriously decided to put lots of other valuable things in with it. Among them, our plug adaptor, a pocketknife, an ebook charger, and even the (now-ruined) rolls of toilet paper that my mother gave us, "just in case."

(And wouldn't you know it, the bathroom stalls were universally bereft of TP.)

Forty-five minutes worth of rinsing later, I returned to our tent to settle in and begin adjusting to the six-hour time difference. I wish that I also had to adjust to the temperature difference, but the heat wave that we left back in Boston apppears to have followed us to the Dutch lowlands. Highs in the low 90s and a sun that doesn't set until 10:30 PM, which might have been bearable if anybody owned an air conditioner in this damn country. But they don't, and despite all of the other fancy features that our tent came with, neither do we.

But for all that, we're alive! We made it here safely! We slept through a night without our tent collapsing on us! We have succesffully navigated the most bizarre public transit system in the world! And we've had a wonderful time with the Dutch language, which seems to consist entirely of random vowels strung together in front of word stems like "buurp," "fahrt," and "dijk."

So long story short, we're still managing to have a grand ol' time.

Liza will post soon with stories about all of the fun we've been having since recouping from the arrival!

Until then--