Spring Breakin' (Rules)

The best part of my spring break was sneaking out after hours in Amsterdam. We had had a pretty tiring day after recovering from jetlag and walking around the city, so Kait and I decided to disregard the rules our teachers had laid out for us and spend the next several hours wandering around the red light district. It was not very difficult to sneak out, as the teachers were all in bed early and the hotel wasn’t busy. Once we got outside, we stopped a man on a bike and asked him how to get over to the red light district. He told us it was too far to walk, but he told us where we could buy some cheap bikes. Kait and I walked over to the sketchy shop he had told us about, and we each bought a rickety bike for 15 euros each. We then rode over to the red light district, which was different than anything either of us had ever experienced before. Almost every single person wandering the street was intoxicated and leering at us as we rode by. In the windows were advertisements for things that our young eyes should never have seen. This freaked us out a little too much, so we left the red light district (we didn’t even see any red lights) and rode beside some of the canals of Amsterdam. We came across a very large canal, where we saw a huge white bird. I realized it was a heron, and then I remembered that Ms. Holwell had pointed out a sign to us that said ‘last year 3 tourists died from white heron.’ I thought that this must be the giant heron that had killed the tourists, so I screamed at Kait to turn our bikes around and go down one of the skinny little alleys between buildings. After a few minutes of hard riding, we found ourselves alongside a quiet canal with a bench facing an arched bridge. We stopped to rest, and then we realized that this was the bench that was featured in the ‘Fault in Our Stars’ movie. Satisfied with our lucky find, Kait and I headed back for the hotel. We threw our bikes over the fence of the zoo that was near our hotel so that the teachers wouldn’t get suspicious when they saw two crappy bikes ditched next to the hotel doors. (The flamingoes were quite startled when the bikes crashed into their quiet pond.) We then snuck back up to our hotel room, went to bed, and went along with the group the next day, acting as if we had been in our rooms the whole night. During the day the next day, we passed the white heron warning sign we had seen, only to realize that it actually said ‘last year 3 tourists died from white heroin,’ not ‘white heron.’