Amsterdam

Today was a loooong day. I got up at 4:45 a.m. and Isaiah drove me to the airport in Detroit. I ended up not getting on the first couple of flights out because they were packed for the 4th of July weekend. I met a couple people from Minnesota at the airport though and we all ended up flying to Appleton, WI together, then I got a flight before them back to Minneapolis out of there. Since I didn´t make it to Minneapolis at the intended time, Dad brought my stuff to me at the airport (my passport, some blank CD-Rs, etc...) and then it was off to catch a flight to Amsterdam. I ended up having to wait a few flights, but I made it on the last one and it could not have been better timing. The flight left at 9 p.m. and we had an awesome airplane (an A330) which had in-seat entertainment systems in every single seat. The flight got into Amsterdam at noon the next day, so I felt virtually no jet-lag whatsoever. The flight out of Amsterdam to Florence, Italy had already left at 10 a.m. so I booked a hotel for the night and took a walk around the City Centre. It was an awesome city and had a crazy social scene, but it was incredibly dirty. Garbage was everywhere in the streets. But I went and grabbed some food at a local pizza place, had a Heineken (after all, it´s brewed in Holland) and watched the England-Portugal World Cup match. The the morning, an airport shuttle picked me up and after heckling with the gate agents who knew NOTHING about the open-ended ticket I was using to fly standby, I finally got on the flight to Florence, Italy.