Our team survived the first international flight from Vancouver to Amsterdam. The service was good but wow was there no leg room! It was almost 10 hours in a tight plane so movement and sleeping weren’t really options, on the bright side at least the food was great! Now to shock everyone who knows I don’t eat seafood or fish, I actually ate a fill fillet of fish with my meal. Who ever thought the first place I would have decent fish would be 40,000 feet in the air.
So we had a 10 hour layover in Amsterdam, after getting turned around in the airport a few times we finally made it to security. I realized having a good Dutch name help then just push me through, and officially my first and second passport stamps are both from the Netherlands! Happy about that. Now poor Rylan though was just grilled by the same guy and had an issue getting into the country.
We found the train and made it downtown. Our first stop was a Canal boat tour across from the train station. What a gorgeous place, so much history with a majority of it still being from the 17th century. Definitely the best way to see Amsterdam! We wandered around and had some dinner. It just amazed us to see all of the bikes everywhere, and all were fairly old looking. One thing I’ll say is people are a lot healthier and fitter over here. It’s a shame most of Canada can’t be the same.
One thing I realized in my next travels is to get more currencies in advance. My Debit and Visa didn’t work, no one took american or Canadian and few take my Amex. Not only that but the bank machines were all in Dutch and couldn’t figure out if it was asking for

what currency or language I wanted. We thankfully found a currency exchange and transfered some to euros. It a little weird having 3-4 currencies on you all at once!
Our next flight was to Nairobi, Kenya so thankfully we ended up on Kenya airlines, it was heaven in that flight!! I had leg room, comfortable seats and great food and service. It was time for us to head to Africa!……