Alex's Travels

From Moldova to Prague

We left Moldova Thursday July after putting the finishing touches on the fence paint job and saying goodbyes to staffers and beneficiaries at the centre. We caught the overnight train from Chisinau to Bucharest and spent the evening with a Moldovan woman intent on using the opportunity to improve her English skills.

Bucharest was better this time around because we stayed with locals instead of in a hostel. We arrived a little after 6 in the morning on Friday the 21st and had the whole day to kill before our hosts would be home from work, so we put our stuff in the station lockers and explored the city. That night, we went out to a relaxed outdoor cafe with our hosts. Delia is a 26-year-old Brit who has been living in Romania for three years as a manager for an international HR recruitment company. Her boyfriend has lived in Bucharest his whole life and liked to sleep as late into the day as possible before he needed to get up to smoke a cigarette. On Saturday, Alyssa and I hung around their flat then met Mihaela, a Romanian who lived in London for a year, for drinks on a building-top bar. Afterwards, we grabbed dinner and then went to an expensive DJ KidLoco concert.

We left Sunday July for Amsterdam, where God knows what happened. Within an hour of arriving, we were smoking a joint in one of the city's hundreds of coffeeshops and never looked back. We had all sorts of plans for our time in Holland, like seeing the flower market and taking a day trip to The Hague, but none of them never materialized. Instead, we took trips of a different sort. We often ended up in Vondel Park, a gathering place for tourists and others enjoying The Netherland's lax drug laws. We met some characters in the hostel and enjoyed a nice dinner out courtesy of Alyssa's dad, but the four days there are already a blur. A wonderful blur. It was alot of fun.

We're now back in Prague, bringing the experience full circle. Unfortunately Ray, our couchsurfing friend who was supposed to host us once again, is hospitalized with appendecitis.

posted by The League: Reassembled @ 8:11 AM