August 27

We woke up this morning with not a lot of sleep (3,5 hours), and walked over to the Van Der Sloots for breakfast.  It was a nice breakfast as always (til yet, every meal in the Netherlands has been fantastic).  Oh, and by the way, Rob's family is vegetarian, but you really wouldn't even notice it.  We had a spaghetti sauce last night that had what you would have thought was meat in it, but it was actually something else with the same texture, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten.  After breakfast we said our goodbyes, then Rob took us to the train station.  There he bought us a ticket to Amsterdam, because the machine would only take cards and we had only cash.  I cannot overstate at all how generous Petra and her family were to us while we were in the Netherlands.  We arrived after about 45 minutes in Amsterdam Centraal station and then walked to our hotel based on directions that Leonoor and Marie-José had given us.  We were able to check in early, then take a walking tour of the city to get a sense of things.  This was our third walking tour by the same company, given on a tips only basis.  They have all had colorful funny guides, and this one was no exception.  Marc and I also went looking for jerseys again in Amsterdam, and the two places that we visited, which were recommended by Petra's son Marco were closed, but we talked to the people inside, who said they didn't have anything left.  That was unfortunate, but near the last one we bought some 'Rijstafel' for dinner, which was quite tasty.  We met Joe later that night, because his train was a bit mistimed with our arrival, but we found him nonetheless.  Later tonight at midnight we went to another club, this time in Amsterdam to meet Leonoor, Patrick and Roxy again.  It was a bigger one, and there were a lot more people, almost exclusively Dutch, so no tourists.  We danced for about 4 hours there, which was pretty tiring, and not something that I would normally enjoy doing.  There was a pretty good mix of American and Dutch mixes that the DJ was mixing (too many uses of the word 'mix'? maybe.).  So after that, we were pretty tired and fell right asleep back in the hostel.