Trials and Tribulations

    So, this past weekend, 5 of my friends and I chose to travel to Amsterdam, Netherlands. It was a great experience and a very fun weekend. We went to the Van Gogh Museum, took a stroll through the Red-Light district, went into a couple of other museums, and went to see a floating flower market. As well as just exploring the city and seeing where we ended up. It was a Thursday through Sunday trip starting in Dublin Thursday night, so we could get our early morning flight on Tuesday. May I brag that that flight cost only 13 euros! As much as we would have liked it to go smoothly, there were some bumps in the road. We thought that it would be interesting to call them the trials of Amsterdam, and we kept track of them! Might I add that none of these are really serious, but they are fun. They are as follows! 

The Trials of Amsterdam

Trial 1
-Finding the right bus stop
Trial 2
- Being able to get on the bus (the big green bus)
Trial 3
-The bus hits a truck (yes, we were fine)
Trial 4
- Nicole’s phone died, so we can't check into the hostel
Trial 5
-4-hour bus ride (should have been 3 hours) + Grace clawing at the window
Trial 6
- Stuck for forty minutes on da plane
Trial 7
-Dutch ice cream and French fry shop. We couldn’t read the menu.
Trial 8
- The fire alarm got set off in the hotel, and we had to evacuate. The first exit we went to wouldn’t open, so we had to find another exit. (It was a false alarm, but still annoying)
Trial 9
-Finding Dunkin’ Donuts
Trial 10
- Dodging airplanes on the tarmac
Trial 11
- We don’t know which big green bus to get on
Trial 12
- Grace sings “Wheels on the Bus” while we all suffer from heat stroke
Trial 13

-Trial by fire. This bus is too hot to sustain human life. We still have an hour left on the way back, and there is a biblical amount of traffic. The 9th circle of Hell. Fuck Dante and fuck his Inferno.  

As you can see, they were not very serious, but we thought that they were funny. Within W.B. Yeats' poem "The Stolen Child," there is a line that says, "For the world's fuller of weeping than you

can understand." We understood that there is a lot more hurt in the world than our little trials within a small trip, and there are sometimes when we cannot understand to the extent of what people are going through in other places. As we have learned, the Irish people have gone through so much, so for us this is very minuscule. Any way we had a great weekend, and I am glad that I was able to go on a trip out of Ireland.