I'm Home!

Well lookie here! I'm home at last! Well, I've been here for several days, actually, in somewhat of an exhausted stupor, but I am back to tell you that I am happy and ready to show you my trip.

Huzzah!

I had a wonderful time while I was away. I had so many new experiences, and made so many friends. My delegation traveled alongside another from North Dakota, which as a whole formed a group of 41 students. By the end we were all like a family...singing repetitive, yet catchy songs on bus rides, eating each others food, assigning familial roles, etc! (Well, it was mostly me eating other people's food, I have to admit...) 

I did so much, and I have so much to say, that to tell you everything about my trip in detail would take a very, very, long time. Quite honestly, I'm not sure how to tell you all the details! I might have make several posts, each including an enthralling narrative and sprinkles of pictures. Or, I could do it all in one fell burst. We'll see. I'm doing this as I go.

Soooo....

Let's jump right into this!

DAY ONE:

I slept surprisingly well for a girl who's experience of a life time was to start the next day. It's a good thing, too, since I was going to be up for the next forty-eight hours. My flight was at noon, and I was supposed to be there at the airport two hours early. Since we had to do a few things before the flight, I woke up at seven. We had Subway for breakfast, and it would be the last of the fastfood I would have for seventeen days...yeah. Sad moment. Fried food is good food.

So good. . .

*snivel*

Anyway, I wouldn't mourn deep-fried goodness until late in the trip. Should I really be morning the loss of heart disease, anyway? We arrived at Indianapolis Airport a little later. I am pretty sure that JFK Airport in New York is bigger, but Indianapolis Airport seemed bigger to me. It's massive and shiny! We met with the rest of our delegation. Passports were handed out, bags were tagged and put on the conveyer belt, and we gathered in the shopping cul-de-sac until preparations were ready. We had a lot of down time, my mom, my sister, and I, so we bought a frappe from McDonald's and chilled.

The airport dining area.

We gathered together again after that. We each have a delegation number so we could keep track of ourselves. We started with twenty-five, since the other delegation from North Dakota had numbers one through twenty-five. We have count offs, where each delegate counts off his or her number in succession. I thought I would mention this now, since count offs happen a lot during the trip, and there are some funny stories with them! I'm number thirty six, and luckily I never missed saying my number unless I fell into a session of deep thought. That, like, totally happened like, twice.

I do not have much pictures of my airport experience, but I won't forget it. Soon we were all ready to go, and it was time say good bye to our family. I was emotional about it, but I didn't shed any tears, thank goodness. I think crying would have made saying good bye harder to do.

Off we go! We had to wait for our flight.

The dramatic silhouette of two girls waiting for our plane.

 But then we boarded. The plane from Indianapolis to New York was a small, 32-seater with a cabin that lingered with the smell of stale sweat. It was clean, though, and I had a good seat mate. Have I ever told you that I had never flown before? I wasn't very scared because I have the up most confidence in today's technology, but I was wary of the whole cabin pressure thing. I have sensitive ears, and a friend told me that chewing gum helps with the ear-popping, so I was chewing my gum vigorously to say the least. The plane took off, which I must say is my favorite part. I was giggling like mad with glee. But I don't fly very well. It isn't the fear of heights, and I don't think it's motion sickness because I don't look out the window, but I suddenly got very ill halfway through the 2 hour journey. The girl next to me took good care of me by distracting me with a game of cards. It helped a lot.

We landed, and I was alive! After my feet were on the ground I was as right as rain.

My fellow delegates are fine too; THEY didn't get sick at all.

We checked in and did all of that wonderfully entertaining airport stuff before we had a 3 hour dead-time. We all got something to eat, because we wanted as little of airplane food as possible.

P-I-Z-Z-A is G-O-O-D

I won't get into the details of the airport. We hopped on our plane and this time it was a massive thing. Three rows of seating in the middle, and two rows on the sides. It was a fat bird of a plane, and the one I had ridden before it was just its scrawny offspring. I got a window seat, ha ha, which mean I had a wall to lean against when I wanted to sleep. The flight had free movies, and an excellent selection. A friend of mine, Josh, went simply ecstatic when he learned that he could watch Harry Potter, which is is favorite movie series ever.

Three and a half hours of happiness within one small remote.

Me? All I wanted to do was sleep, but you know what, that wasn't going to happen! During the 8 hour flight, I didn't sleep for more than thirty minutes. I have no clue why. About four hours in, we had airplane food. Not much to say about it except that

The Legends Are True

And so, Day One quite literally melted into Day Two, whilst I flew on Momma Bird across the ocean.

DAY TWO

Tired yet? I was. I stayed awake enough to watch the sun set, then rise again only a few hours later. It was weird, but in a really cool way! Kind of like riding in a time machine with glass windows and scrawny metal bird offspring. Yup, just like that.

We landed in Amsterdam! Yay yay yay! Oh, the ability to move blessed limbs, how I missed thou. I bounded off the plane with my group, raced to baggage claim, where we...claimed our bags. My bag is a wonderful standout color of black, and I had no trouble spotting it among the other, much less black suitcases. More bounding to our meeting place. We had an hour of dead-time to wait for our North Dakota delegation to land and join us, so we set off and had a party, baby.

WOO! WE'RE OFF TO THE PHARMACY!

Woo! A sign in Dutch!

It's a giant clog on a giant pedestal! 

It's a thousand mini clogs with various, non-cloggy uses!

      Mid party, we decided to get something to eat. Well, my friends did. I was still full from my Food of Legend dinner. We stopped at the largest Burger King in all of Holland! Not a hard thing to achieve, but hey.

Duh duh duh!

The guy in management got really ticked shortly after we took the photo. He waved his arms about maniacally, pointing at us and jabbering various phrases in Dutch. Apparently, it is so not cool to take pictures of fast food restaurants, and you shouldn't do it, ever. While I was waiting for my friends to order, I was approached my a security guard. He was burly, and I was afraid I had done something wrong until he said,

"Don't worry, you haven't done anything wrong" and we had a nice pleasant chat. Interacting with the locals already, yeah!

We went back to wait for North Dakota. We waited by the window looking into the baggage claim, in order to spook them out, but they must have had a different baggage claim because they snuck out behind us! North Dakota had a lot more students to our eighteen, and I was a little shocked when our group suddenly grew to forty-one strong. Wow! A full bus from hereon out, huh? Speaking of buses. . .

Our first bus! The girl holding the microphone is our delegation manager, and I think she was only 20 at this point, but she was really mature and cool! She's English, too, which makes it even better. She was going to manage our activities from this point onward. Our first activity was the cheese farm.

We met the family early on, and they were really kind. The cheese farm was a quaint, homey place, and I liked it a lot. We went to a giant barn that was filled with structures of hay, set up like a play ground.

We swung around on a giant rope. I gave it a whirl, and had a blast. When I tried to get down, my foot got tangled in the foot-hold, and I got stuck. But, thanks to my amazing dexterity and flexibility, I put one foot on the ground while my other leg was vertical to my head, and this was where I untied myself. Good fun, good fun!

Our delegation!

Next, we learned how to make clogs. The man teaching us was really funny, and he made the clogs like he had made them hundreds of times. Judging by the basket of clogs behind him, I think he has, ha.

I made a clog from a log and it made me kind of groggy/ don't let your clogs get too wet or they will get so soggy

We also walked the cow fields. We all hopped into a wagon pulled by a tractor and set off for those moo-velous cows...until our tractor ran out of gas. Then we trekked it on foot, which was awesome. I barely stepped in any cow pies, which is a feat to behold because there were a lot of cows. Speaking of cows...

My wonderful, intelligent, grinning cow.

You may have seen this cow once, before, but even if you have, tough luck. I am showing this cow again. I simply adore this cow. I loved him so much I adopted him. Yup. He reminded me of my guinea pig back home. I think cows and guinea pigs are closer than chimpanzees are to humans. Just an observation.

Next, we learned how to make CHEESE. Sweet, delicious cheese. I love cheese almost as much as I love cows, so this was interesting. Of course, there was a slight problem with me trying not to fall asleep as I listened to the nice cheese lady tell us about how cheese is made. It wasn't that she was uninteresting, it's just that I was really tired.

Look at our smiling, completely exhausted faces.

We got to try a lot of cheese. Peppercorn cheese, garlic cheese, smoked cheese. It was all there. At dinner we got to try stroopwaffles, which are delicious. They are caramel squished between two paper thin waffles. Yum yum.

After dinner, we boarded our bus for our next destination. The two little girls who lived on the farm greeted us by riding next to our bus, riding donkeys. One lucky boy got the opportunity to ride one.

Weeeeeee!

And we were off for a brief orientation of Amsterdam! We visited Dam Square and a few other cool places. I don't remember the exact details of the tour, since I had by that point turned into a zombie, but I have PICTURES!

View of Amsterdam streets from our bus.

Some, as soon as they hit the bus seats, found themselves rendered unconscious.

One of my favorite pictures. Taken from a bridge.

Okay, not a lot of pictures, but there are more to come, trust me! What I didn't fail to take a picture of was my very first hotel room in Europe. It was probably the largest hotel room I had all of my journey, actually. It was very nice.

It's...a bed!

It's...a toilet...

Pleasant view.

Relaxation at last! And what a full 48 hours of consciousness! It was a really good day, and even though I was sleepy, I enjoyed every moment of it! I wrote in my journal, which is something we have to do every day, and fell asleep.

More days to come tomorrow!

Esther