Finally the Netherlands! Last Saturday Denise and I bought a SchönesWochenendeTicket and took all possible regional trains to the Dutch border; since we found another guy to share the cost of the group ticket with, we both paid around 14€ for getting to the Netherlands nicely sitting in a train. We thought about hitch-hiking, but after the exhausting experience on the Danish border, I thought I might prefer sitting in a train for 7 hours instead, although our hitch-hiking trip to Berlin (we visited my ex-collegue Marieke) was extremely succesful: we found 2 Spanish girls, who apparently had very little experience at hitch-hiking, but nonetheless found us all rides! When we came, we saw them on the first intersection in Halle towards Berlin, and thought the spot was horrible to hitch a ride. We hadn't said that yet, that a car pulled over and collected them, so we asked the lonely driver if we could join them, and we were brought all the way to Potsdam. Without us, those two girls would have probably never made it, most importantly because they didn't even know where Potsdam was... later, we split at a gas station: they stayed there and asked the drivers, and we stood on the street further on, until they had found a ride and took us with them again. Brilliant!So, on Saturday we went to Enschede with the train, and since we managed not to write our name on the ticket, tried to sell it again at our destination, but found no buyers. So we surfed a couch in the student village on the university campus, and were offered dinner and breakfast with the other students. The next day we packed our stuff and went to the street to Hengelo, where the motorway started. With two rides we were at a big station on the motorway, where we stood with our sign for over an hour. At around 3 I started losing hope that I could be at the welcome reception for arriving summer school participants in Leiden, scheduled for 5 p.m., but then suddenly two cars stopped on the ramp we were waiting at, at the exit of the restaurant. One of the two was a retired couple who were going precisely to Leiden, so they brought us all the way to the reception, about 150km, allowing me to be there only 20min after the start.In Leiden, we are staying in an unbelievable place. The guy is actually the CouchSurfing Ambassador of Leiden, and he's completely crazy. He has a 1-room apartment of a few square meters, and shares bathroom and kitchen with 4 other students living in the house, and yesterday we were 7 sleeping here, with 2 American girls and 2 Russians, sleeping on 3 mattresses and 2 couches. You couldn't see the floor between the mattresses. We spent the night at a nice pub and celebrated the last night of the Eurotrip of the two girls from Atlanta, and we all went to bed like a nice, happy family. Tomorrow I'll probably start uploading some pictures.
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