(Not Rated)

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Friday I found out that Oxana (AIESEC’s Sibiu First CEEDer in 2002) is having a traineeship in The Netherlands at Nike. Oxana was LCP of AIESEC Kiev in Ukraine – 2003-2004, she stayed with us 1 month.

As she is living in Utrecht, few km away from Rotterdam, me and Pixi decided to pay her a visit, so after Saturday cleaning (weekends are cleaning days), we took a train to Utrecht.

We’ve meet Oxana at the Treffpunct. In every train station there is such a Treffpunct, marked by a specific flag where you can meet people that are waiting for you, so you don’t have to look for them in the whole train station. And trust me train stations here are big, like small Airports, with 16-20 tracks, stores, etc.

Utrecht was the most biggest city in The Netherlands till the 19th century. We visited the city, and frankly it’s the most beautiful city I visited till now, with canals, historic buildings (like a renovated Sibiu :) ), very beautiful parks and lakes, its to beautiful to describe. You just have to see it. There are also wild Gees and Swans swimming in the lakes and canals. You just see them flying over your head and plunging in the water. I guess there are no Romanians or Gypsies here to EAT them. :D

As in every city, in Utrecht are lots of church towers with clocks. The interesting thing is that every time they ring, they sound different (there are 4 or more bells in one tower).

Another thing these people are wild about are bicycles … they have a LOT of them. Utrecht has 250.000 ppl and 300.000 bikes are stolen every year :D Because of that they only have shitty bikes everywhere. Very cheap city bikes blaaah! There are huge bikes parking spaces everywhere, also in Rotterdam. Well enough about the bikes…

I stayed over night at Oxana, then in the morning I visited more of the city.

Did I mention I HATE dutch houses? Every one of them has stairs inside, but not normal stairs, very small ones like climbing into a tower. You can easily break your neck if you fall down the stairs. :P

I’ve made a lot of pictures with my phone but I can’t download them yet, in the meantime you can visit the homepage of the Utrecht here! or do a Google search on “Utrecht”.

Around 3 PM I decided it was time to go home. The really “nice” thing that happened on the way home, was that my train got diverted an I ended in a different city, Den Haag instead of Rotterdam. Why? Because there was a football game in Rotterdam and the drunk supporters thought it would be a thrill to walk on the Railways tracks. So every train that passed trough Rotterdam had to be diverted. And Rotterdam is like a change station for Amsterdam (Airport) and other major cities. So, some of the people I was with missed their plane … nice isn’t it? I also ended in a stop-train (personal pe romaneste) which of course stopped at every f*king station. I got in Rotterdam 4 hours later than I was supposed to.

One joke is that I can read some Dutch but not understand spoken Dutch, and guess what all announcements in the trains are in Dutch :), when I got in Den Haag, no train to Rotterdam was listed … It took me a while to figure out where my train was leaving and I almost missed it. If I didn’t get on that train I had to take a train somewhere at 1 AM. :P

Another thing is that these stupid stupid people dont accept 100 EUR bill. Guess what is the amount of money I had in my pocket? 1,20 EUR and …. a 100 EUR bill. No one exchanges a 100 EUR bill except for Casinos. In some places they don’t accept 100, 50, 20 and 10 EUR bills. It’s like you have money, but actualy you don’t have it! Reaaaally stupid.

And this concludes my blog entry for today.
The Lion.