The Hotel in Amsterdam

Here is the faucet from the shower/tub in the hotel. See if you can figure out just by looking at it how it works.

Now this is clever: when you come in the room, the lights don’t work until you put your card key into this holder. That means you always know where your key is when you leave the room.

A Quick Walk Around Amsterdam

Here is a variety of pictures taken in Amsterdam before the train left.

Back to Hamburg

The trip back to Hamburg was relatively uneventful; I had 19 minutes to transfer trains in Osnabrück, and at one point the train was 10 minutes late, but we made it on time. I got in to Hamburg 20 minutes late, but that didn’t matter to me as I had no further connections to make. Here are pictures taken from the train.

Back in Hamburg, here’s a store that really wants you to know that they are having a sale.

Encounter with an American

So finally I got really hungry for vegetables, and went to Mr. Clou at the main train station and had their Vital Salat with corn, carrots, radishes, sprouts, some sort of lettuce, cucumber, tomato, and red pepper. It was really great; well worth the 3.80 Euro.

This one young lady sat down next to me, and I had heard her order in English. It turns out she was a student at a university in California, and was on an extended tour of Europe. So she’s eating her salad, and she shows me a 10 euro note and asks, “Is this money real?”

I said, “Well, yes, probably. If the store is passing counterfeit money, they would get shut down. If you get money from a bank you know it will be good. If you exchange your money with some guy named Hans in a back alley, you’re taking your chances.”

“I don’t know,” she says, “It just looks so small. It doesn’t seem real.”

So I explained to her how the bills are different sizes; the 5 is the smallest, the 10 is slightly larger, the 20 larger than that, and the 50 even larger. I showed her this by stacking up a 5, 10, and 20 that I had. I explained that, in this way, blind people can tell what the money is, unlike in the U.S. (By the way, someone has introduced a bill in Congress to have our paper currency come in different sizes; otherwise it violates the Americans with Disabilities Act.) In any case, the student was just amazed by this, so it looks like I did my good deed for the day.

The Harley Davidson Convention

I went out to the Reeperbahn again, and all the Harley Davidson riders were there. There were stages with performers, and one was a topless lady doing a dance around some guy sitting in a chair. The crowd approved of it greatly.

Wrapping Up

I also decided to make up for lost time and eat myself silly since this was my last night here. I had some curry wurst, then walked about halfway back from Reeperbahn to the main station, took the subway back, and then went out and had Döner on flatbread. Basically, a chicken gyros. It was quite good. I finished off the evening with some cookies with chocolate/hazelnut filling and yogurt. I hope I don’t regret all this tomorrow on the plane.

When I got back to the Billwerder-Moorfleet station, a woman and her daughter asked me where the hotel was, so I walked back with them rather than running back. We had a nice conversation, and I guess that was my second good deed for the day.

That’s about it from Europe. I am going to finish packing, get a little bit of sleep, and head to the airport in a few hours to get back to the United States.