Amsterdam!

After the flight from hell, my group and I arrived in Amsterdam for an 8 hour layover. I mean sure we were excited to maybe go explore the city but we were exhausted and cranky and we all barely knew each other so a little awkward. All of us decide to explore the city so after a 30 minute, embarrassing struggle to get our bags into a locker with no help and instructions that were in broken English, we were on our way. Our coordinator told us before we left America that it would be no big deal to leave the airport and get to the city, she said "Take a cab". So naturally we listened. We get in this cab and tell him to take us to the Anne Frank house. After talking a bit and thinking we had been in the cab for a long time, we look up to see that our cab-fare was already 45 euros. Crap. So we all started to kind of nervously laugh and say maybe we can walk, maybe we can get out and find it ourselves. I do not know what happened, but 20 minutes later, hyperventilating belly laughing from Saida and a cab driver who would not let us out, we get to the Anne Frank house and pay this man 87 euros for his services. The sad part was, we didn't even go inside Anne Frank's house. However, we explored and found a McDonalds for Saida and went on a boat ride through the city. The boat ride all but put us to sleep and then 6 cranky Americans tried to find their way back to the airport by getting on a train that took way too long to get tickets for because no one would speak English! Drained and grumpy we slept in the airport for about an hour and then boarded the plane to Kiev. I don't know if it was the cab ride, or the lack of sleep, or the general musk of weed in the air in Amsterdam, but some kind of magic happened and we all became instant friends, like we had known each other forever. That is in fact the biggest tender mercy I can think of.