Hannover - Amsterdam

The most "adventurous" day from out vacation. Pfoa... we started the day at 6:45 am, because Jan and Sybille had to leave for work at 7:30. We stopped by at Continental AG Hannover so I could take some pictures in front of the building, then we went downtown and visited the main attractions. When we were about to leave... surprise: the GPS is dead. I unplug it, see a lot of components in the cigarette lighter... I take them out, try to put them back in place, plug in the GPS again... nothing. I insert the cigarette lighter, it doesn't heat up. Au... what are we going to do without GPS when out trip has just started? It's wonderful, we have 2 GPSs and it's the cigarette lighter that breaks down.

We don't panic, we take the laptop, we power it on, connect the GPS to the laptop... yeah, the GPS will function until the laptop's battery goes empty. So we take advantage of this situation, search for a Renault dealer and stop by. When they see us, they come up with things like "you'll leave the car here until tomorrow and we'll see what we can do". Hello, Deutchland, we have a schedule, reservations, we have to get to A'dam today, what do you mean with tomorrow? Well... let's see, I'll have a look, "der Meister" says, a guy of about 30 years. He takes a look, he says that some 15A safety fuse is not there although it should be. We tell him that the cigarette lighter was ok until now, we haven't touched the safety fuses, so even if it should have been there and it's not, it's not because of that safety fuse that the cigarette lighter is not working. He takes another look, calls one of his colleagues, that other guy takes a look for about half an hour and in the end, apparently, he found that safety fuse and apparently it was defective so he had to replace it. Unfortunately, when the safety fuse broke down, the power cord of Iuli's GPS broke down as well. Sorry Iuli :D The GPS is still functional, but we have to get you a charger.

And so that you can see the "difference" between Germans and Romanians, when we asked how much we have to pay, he answered, like a true German: zwanzig. Without receipt, of course, because it we wanted one we had to want until the next day :)

It was ok, because we were in a hurry. Besides, instead of leaving Hannover at 9:30, we left at 12:30. After we left, I wanted to close my window when we entered the highway (because, until then, it's obvious that it wasn't necessary to close the window, since I drove with 50km/h), it closes bit by bit and completely, meaning that now I can't open it anymore. That's the second good news.

Anyway, even though A'dam is only 375km away from Hannover, after about 200km I felt that I could no longer keep my eyes open. I felt so sleepy. I found a park place and took a nap for about one hour. After that, We played badminton and the truck drivers looked at us as if we were coming from the circus. Then we left. We reached A'dam, we found the hotel, but when I asked the dude from the reception about some parking place, he burst out laughing. Parking place in A'dam? Well ... 4EUR/h, 36EUR/day or you can drive to the Ajax Arena and pay there 6 eur/day; they will also give you a subway ticket so you can come back to the hotel. So, apparently we drove there ... about 7km, we entered P6 (meaning park place 6), we asked the gatekeeper and he says that 6eur/day is valid only for P1. That sucks. We can't get to P1, because it's full of "forbidden" signs, so we give it up and go back to the hotel to park there for 36eur per day. And there (meaning in P6), surprise. Our credit card doesn't function, only credit cards from "Dutch" banks function, so we exchange some money at Lidl (after 2 shopping tours in which we bought juice and chocolate), and go with 18 coins of 2 EUR each to the automatic parking device to get the parking ticket. Of course it doesn't function when we try the first time, the dude from the reception helps us, who, by the way, him, but, well, that's the way it is.

So, at about 5:30, we finally get to leave the room and have a walk through A'dam, to see some incredibly narrow buildings (Flemish style) and to see the Red District which, little by little, turns into Chinatown. It rained about 3-4 times, of course, as if all the problems we had today were not enough.

So we came back to the hotel - ah, I haven't told you that we are not staying in the hotel where we made reservations, they gave us a key from a hotel which is across the channel, because they have a "problem", but it's ok, it's a room with 4 beds and we stay only the 2 of us, looks pretty well, the furniture is a bit old and we have a view to one of the million channels of A'dam. perfect :) Too bad is raining, i would stay with the chair on the balcony to watch the channel.

They have houses on this channels, meaning some floating barracks used as a residence. some of them really look good, one had the curtain open so we could see all of his house :)

Tomorrow will take another tour of A'dam then we'll go to R'dam to see the biggest harbour of Europe, then we go to Bruges and we stay for the night at Jan's place in Gent.