Today I did the train thing again to centraal station. I had read if you get on without a ticket you can be fined €35 euro. With the ticket I buy, I never chip in. I just kinda find an open gate and walk through. Also were you'd go if you were going to skip the fare. I had only been approached once, on my train from the airport and the conductor dude scanned my ticket. All good. So as I was pondering the cost effectiveness of skipping fares and not paying much attention, the conductor misses found a bunch of young people who didn't have ticvkrts and she was explaining the fine. She let them get off at that stop so they could buy tickets. Then she came to me and scanned my ticket. So there you go. Buy your tickets folks! Damn trains.
Bijmer (pronounced buy-meer) arena station
Today's first plan was to find star bikes bike rental. They are near central station and I wanted to confirm my booking. So tomorrow I will either be getting a granny bike (its what the Dutch use) or one with 7 gears. I believe they charge more for hand brakes so I might be going more authentic and opting out. Star bikes was easy enough to find. I think they are moving up the street while I am adventuring. I can do this right?!
So then I thought I'd take the free ferry across the river to north Amsterdam. Again I avoided the tourist spot but this might not have been the best choice here as there wasn't much there.
I was getting hungry and hoping I'd find a coffee shop but I did not. I did however find a grocery store! So I wandered around in there (I'll put the pics in another post) and bought some sort of drink, some bread and some salami type meat. Again hoping for a park bench but failing to find one, I just sat in the grass and ate my food (well half).
I was going to try to find a camping store there but that didn't work out so I walked back to the ferry. Along the way I was stopped by a lady getting out of a car speaking...something. I smiled and kept walking but she said it again so I finally said sorry, English?! So she switched to English and was looking for directions to the tourist spot! We pulled up google maps on my phone and semi figured it out. Her problem was that they were in car and Amsterdam is not a car place.
I had planned on finding a sim card for my phone but by the time I got back to the ferry my tummy was not liking one of the things I ate/drank (probably drank because it turned out to be a drinkable yogurt). The sim plan had to be put in hold and relocated. My tummy said go back to the hostelle. I hopped on a train and made it back to the hostelle.
This time I got smart and just asked the hostelle owner if she knew where I could get a sim card and she walked over to the tourist map wall stuff and there were sim cards right there. Problem semi solved. Its a lyca sim but I read that it doesn't tether so I might try to find lebara sim. We all know I gotta blog and I'm not typing this out on the phone!
So maybe its time to wander again. I've had a shower so why not. And pick up a beer or two :p
Leann
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