Last Day - Featuring the Red Light District and Other Clusterfucks....

Travis, in his natural environment.

Have you seen these people?


And now for my last trick, I will be in transit for 41 hours, sleep for maybe 5 or 6 of those, and make an evil plan for the downfall of Air Canada, who have also lost my luggage for me. But first, let me tell you a little about the last couple days of our trip, spent traveling from Luxembourg to Amsterdam, via Germany.
It was another early start for us to the train station in Luxembourg to catch our Deutch Bahn train that would take us through Germany to Cologne and then to Amsterdam. It was an uneventful journey that I won't bore you with other than to say we had First Class tickets which just made it easier for Georgia to fall asleep on the train without anyone to bother her. That girl can sleep anywhere!

The scenery was quite lovely as the train ran along the Mosel river through wine country, even if it was raining.

I wish I had taken a picure of the German man on horse back stopped at a train crossing as we went by, who flipped the bird to all of us as that was probably the most exciting thing to have happened. That and sharing our train cabin with two very nice young Mormons (?) from Arizona who were travelling on a mission (aren't we all on a mission?) and who spent the duration of the trip reading heavily bound books with the titles 'Divine Inspiration and God' and also 'The Soul: What is it?' or something like that. And when I say 'reading' I mean staring at the same page for hours on end with a pen in hand making random underlinings and notes. It was a real struggle for these boys to read their books and I couldn't help but wonder why they didn't just give it up. At one point the younger of the two was scrolling instagram on his phone in between the pages of the book. I was wondering why he was being so secretive about it and almost told him not to worry, God is watching him anyway so he didn't need to hide it, but thought better of it. Bless them and their convictions even if they had chosen probably the worst place in the world to do mission work - who exactly did they think they would convert? Most people here, refugees or otherwise, have already got their own religion sorted out, thank you very much all the same.
Anyway, it was about 3pm when we arrived in Amsterdam and found our hotel. We all got inadvertently stoned on the walk through the crowds of pot-smokers from the station to the hotel, I'm sure of it.
I was loathe to take too many pictures as Amsterdam was a complete gong show and I felt like it had had enough pictures taken of it already! Remind me not to go there again anytime soon unless it is like, the middle of February and there is a cholera outbreak and the streets are empty.
We did take the obligatory canal cruise but with a smaller less touristy company who also served drinks and snacks, and we all enjoyed it very much, even Travis despite looking like he might be choking in this picture...

This building houses the corporate headquarters for The Rolling Stones, who are based here due to The Netherlands being a tax haven. Maybe you can see their logo on the brass plate... maybe you could care less...?
Amsterdam is of course full of bikes and when I asked how deep the water in the canal was, I was told 3 metres, and that the joke is that it is one metre of mud, one metre of bikes, and one metre of water. About 30 seconds later as we cruised along, we heard a giant splash: a woman had just opened her car door after parking and knocked a bike into the canal. Whoops.
Apparently there are local groups who retrieve bikes from the canals and last year they fished out 15000!
The canals are surprisingly clean and we were told that there is a non-profit who fish out all the plastic from the water in little boats that are made from recycled plastic from the canals. And then one came around the corner. I swear these tours have all these things set up in advance.

After the tour we got some dinner at a great little Asian Fusion restaurant, where the fortunes in the cookies are also fusion:

Uhh, sorry, what?
Next on the agenda was a tour of the Red Light District. Yes that's right.
I had told Zoe a little of what to expect but I can safely and happily say that, in a world where it is hard to get a reaction out of teenagers anymore due to them having already seen everything on social media, both Zoe and Georgia were well and truly shocked! Scantily clad girls writhing around in shop windows, hoards of men roaming the streets, theatres advertising live sex shows, windows full of paraphernalia - it all left them slightly speechless. Fortunately, there is a real culture of respecting the sex workers here and abuse is not tolerated, at least not in public. It's an industry here.

It's all over quite quickly (so to speak) and you're back to this kind of idyllic scene.

As we once again had to get up at 4am to start our journey home, we had an early night. When we got out onto the street the next morning at 4:30am, it was 30% travellers like us, and 70% drunk partiers on their way home from the bars.
I won't ruin things with a giant rant here about the clusterfuck that was our trip home from Heathrow, as I've already done that on Facebook, and it's not over yet, but will say that I had one of the most fun trips ever and will miss my travelling companions greatly. Zoe is going to join her brother Jacob in Sointula for a summer job and then is off to McGill in the fall, and Georgia is moving to Paris to go to fashion school at the end of the summer. I'll miss them so much! I will continue to gather Silly Travis Videos to console myself.

The Ham Girls, as they came to be known. It's a long story...

Thanks for coming along, and until next time...
Jane