Stupid Trains!

Up until Hamburg the trains have been great. But the day we left Hamburg, every train was late, which messed up every connection. So a trip that should have been a few hours took the whole day. Today there is a train strike in Belgium. Just for today, it will be over by tomorrow. We had planed on going to Brussels, but instead we are now on our way to Maastricht. Which is about as close as you can get to Brussels without leaving The Netherlands.

We have just spent three days in Amsterdam. It was a lot of fun. Of all the cities we have been in, Amsterdam seems the most lively. There are so many cafes, cool little shops and great places to eat (The Dutch look like they really have a thing for Pancakes; there are pancake restaurants everywhere). It does not seem to matter what time of day it is there are always people out in the streets. We stayed at a cool little hotel just off a big park, in the middleish of the city. We were on the top floor and there was a neat staircase running up the middle of the building.

We spent the few days we had wandering around the city and a trip to the Van Gogh museum (all of the other large museums have major construction projects underway).

The plan from here is to go to Maastricht to Brussels to Luxembourg then to Berlin for Sunday and Monday night. The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall is on Monday.