Merry Christmas Amsterdam!

I went to Amsterdam for Christmas, as everyone who reads this blog probably knows already, but if you're like me and have listening problems that's why I haven't been answering my phone. Nicole and I came here to visit our other friend, Marissa, who is going to school here.

Amsterdam is really cold. Like, super cold. And it keeps snowing, which usually I would like, but not when I have to walk through it everyday. This trip has caused me to create a new rule: I will never travel to cold places in the winter. I think it's a good rule.

Nicole and I are sleeping on the floor. We have a twin mattress. We shared it the first night, which sucked--Two grown people were not meant to share a bed that size. After the first night we started trading off and now one of us sleeps on an exercise mat on the floor every other night.

And the shower. Let me tell you about the shower.

The shower head is in the middle of the bathroom. A curtain runs right through the middle of the bathroom. The toilet is on the shower side of the curtain. And when you shower, the entire room fills up with water. It's a race against time to finish your shower before the water overflows the bathroom door and into the apartment.

We escaped our lack of beds and bathrooms and went to Belgium the other day, specifically to Brussels and Bruge. It wasn't much of an escape as Nicole and I still had to share a bed. But at least it was a big bed.

I did not love Brussels. There were French people there, which was one reason it sucked. And it was dirty. But it had great waffles.

While in Brussels we went on a day trip to Bruge, which Marissa said would be touristy and lame but which Nicole and I loved. I would go so far as to say that it is my favorite place so far on this trip. There were swans everywhere and lots of awesome chocolate shops and cool Gothic towers. We got chocolates from a chocolate shop called The Chocolate Line that Rick Steves mentions in his book. Hold on, can I put the word chocolate in that sentence anywhere else? No? Okay. My box had lemongrass chocolate, ginger chocolate, passion fruit chocolate etc. It was pretty delicious.

Being in Bruge was like being in the movie In Bruge. But without the murder and mayhem. But still fun.

After our day trip we went back to Brussels, and I drank lots of Belgian beer. I really liked the cherry beer and the passion fruit one. And the mango. Those were good. Nicole had a coconut beer and instead of a glass they gave her a coconut shell. She drank it fast because she was embarrassed that she was the only person in the bar with a shell instead of a glass, which did look kind of silly I guess. She wouldn't let Marissa pour any more of the beer into the shell when she was done drinking it, she just had the rest out of the bottle.

Then we came back to Amsterdam, where we discovered that it had snowed in our absence. And it had gotten colder.