We got on the bus at 1pm and left Bruges for our journey to Amsterdam. At the transit stop they had this food place where you get a bowl and fill it with whatever vegetables you want and they make it into a stir-fry of your choice for you- either Thai, Japanese or Vietnamese with your choice of noodles or rice. They also had buffet style salads, pizza, sandwiches and smoothies- so you make them yourself- cool idea. We got to Amsterdam and caught the tram to our accommodation. We found the address but there was no hostel just a door to a very old looking apartment style house. We were in the 'hood' of Amsterdam. As we couldn’t find the hostel we walked back and forth wondering where on earth this hostel could be when suddenly a man comes up to us and asks if we are looking for accommodation, we say yes and he said 'are you the booking for dixon?' we say yes and follow him to the door that we fisrt came across with no hostel signs. He opens the door- and well our mouths drops- we knew for 12 euro each it would be pretty gross- but nothing prepared us for this- the entrance way's cream carpet was covered in so much dirt and dust it actually looked like a dirty wooden floor. We follow him up the stairs- there are holes in the wall, and we get to 'our room'. It has no curtains, there are live wires hanging from the roof where a lightbulb should be attached and all the plug sockets are just holes in the wall to loose wires- but the lamps work he informs us. Then he sits down on the bed to tell us a story- jess is on the phone using the internet trying to find alternative forms of accommodation. So he tells us that we aren’t listening to his story and quizzes us on the main points he had mentioned- seriously weird. Then he asks us to pay-he only takes cash (of course he does), so we tell him that we need to go to an eftpos machine as we don’t have cash on us. We leave our bags and take our valuables with us and find the nearest internet cafe to try to sort out alternative accommodation. No luck there, so we ask passersbys where a hostel is and they point us to stayokay- a really nice new hostel. We get there and luckily they had room for us- so we check in and leave our handbags at the proper hostel as we don’t want to have any valuables on us when we go to do the dash from the 'hostel' we booked. We get to the ‘hostel’ and take some photos for evidence of how bad it is to send to hostelworld to get out of paying and we run up the stairs grab our bags and do the bolt. See the man lives in the house we were meant to be staying in- we were just in one of his rooms- totally a hostel- NOT!. the tv was up loud in his room so we made it out without him noticing- we ran so fast with our packs on round the corner and out of sight- it was very funny- but when we were in there all we could think of was joseph fritzel.....anyway we are now in a great place- so nice a bit more expensive but we get free breakfast- we just hope we don’t run into that man anytime soon. we can’t stop laughing about it-how do we get ourselves into these situations....
