Time to recap my first day. For starters, the night before I found David, my eventual roommate in Barcelona, at the airport no problem. We then started to make our way to Delft, about 40 minutes away by train, with the help of texting our friend Roby, who was an exchange student at UIC last year, who we were staying with. Dave has a Vodafone cell phone he got from HIS roommate, who was studying in Berlin this summer.
We got off at some station to transfer, got on the wrong train, got off, got on the right train, all in all took like two hours or something to get to her place. We walked to her place with all our luggage, dropped em off, and went out for some beers. Sat right in the city center (its a small-ish town with one main square) and had some beers next to a canal. I happened to mention Westvleteren, "the world's best beer" and Roby's friend said they served it down the street. They didn't have their top beer but two others made by the same monks. Neat.
We had another beer out on the back deck and got to bed at like 1:30. Since it was my first chance at wireless, I sat in bed checking email until 2am. Set my alarm for 10, promptly slept until 11 and then 12 because Dave never woke up to my alarms so I figured he was tired, and I was. Didn't sleep well.
Us and Roby:
A cool old Renault I saw.
We got up and walked around Delft, saw a leaning clock tower like the tower in Pisa, that they corrected mid-construction, and climbed another clock tower (forgot to count the steps) and saw some views of the city- Rotterdam and Den Haag off in the distance. Saw some cool modern homes that we went to check out. Then made our way to the University of Delft to see their library, and turns out they had a bunch of other cool buildings too. We walked around from about 12-4:30, getting kinda sweaty in jeans we'd been wearing since we got on our flight, then hauled back to Roby's, walked down the street to see a windmill we saw on the map, and then walked to the train- the platform was about 2 minutes farther than we thought, we weren't sure if it was just down the street to the right or the left, chose wrong, and then chose the wrong set of stairs to go up- the train was just pulling out when we finally got to it, after being completely out of gas from carrying our bags. We waited another half hour.
Dave in the circular stairs that went forever/The view from the clock tower, of a canal
The view part 2:
A canal covered with duckweed and a cool bridge:
A cool building at the Technical University of Delft:
From inside:
We got to our hotel at 6:45, supposed to meet EVERYONE at 7, and hurried upstairs to shower, hurried back down, only to wait 30 minutes cause two guys fell asleep in their room :) Then we headed out to dinner. Kinda pricey. Nice to have a beer though and sit on the water. Did some internetting last night in the lobby at the hotel, the only place I get wifi in the building, and went to bed at like 3 after getting suckered into video chatting with Tiffany for awhile :)
I'm tired today and started getting a cold like during my flight, so my throat is always dry and I fall asleep stuffy. Nuts!!
No comments:
Post a Comment