Amsterdam

Haveyoueverseenawordspelledlikethis? Welcome to Dutch 101. Or my other favorite example, the word penmanship,nor as they say it in Dutch, shipenman.  Or so it seems, right.  I have thought this in the past and it was really confirmed while I've been in Amsterdam... Is that actually a real language? Because I am not trying to be mean, but it sounds fake. if you have never heard Dutch, you must YouTube right now!

Let's discuss Amsterdam and my sleeping habits to begin. First, I no longer sleep. Greys and Twilight must have planted this idea that sleep is not a real thing because I no longer do it or need it. Usually, I am a solid 8 hour person, as of late, I sleep 5 or maybe 6 and I'm done.  Also, I don't really drink that much water and so I nevere pee. I think maybe I am just finally becoming a true Burkhalter. Dry skin included.

Okay, so back o Amsterdam. First of all, come here! It's stunning, absolutely gorgeous. The people are rediculouly nice, they all speak English perfectly, which makes me feel like me pretend Dutch is not far from the truth, and this is definitely the place for someone with a 32 in inseam and size 40 feet.  In Hawaii, when you go to try on shoes, the sample size is usually s 6 or 7. Here. It's a 9.5.... Just my size! Went to buy pants yesterday, and they had a size 29x32.  Who has that?!

The main square here is called Amsterdam Dam or just Dam. I prefer to say Amsterdam Dam. This is just one of the many, many fun words to say. To be honest, they all sound funny.

So the only train that we could get on from Paris left at 7pm and arrived in Amsterdam at 10:30pm. I was worried that wasn't going to be safe. It was just the opposite. I have no clue what sort of timetable these people operate on, but things were in full swing at 10:30 at night. The only thing missing was the sun. After a small bit of confusion, we found some wifi, found out hotel, yes we should have probably looked up where the hotel was before we got there, we hopped on a tram and rode to muslim neighborhood.


Really quick, this is finally a picture of the storage unit. Here we are packing for Amsterdam.

Okay, so we make it to the hotel in Amsterdam which is on the outskirts of the city, but at the last minute, it was the cheapest one and it didn't have bedbugs like the hostel that I initally booked that Lauren nixed. Probably a wise decision. It was a Christian hostel in the red light district. For 20 bucks more, we got this hotel. Which turned out to be amazing. Usually, rooms in europe are tiny. We had the worlds largest room, like the size of my living room in Hawaii for those of you who know and it was on the top floor overlooking the city! Way cool!

So we stayed there. Immediately, we were both so tired and went to sleep. BTW this is a very common theme for us.

The next morning, we woke up, walked through what turned out to be a very pleasant neighborhood and headed for AmsterdamDam. First question, what are the dutch known for? Clogs, windmills, and cheese!

So we found some cheese!

Are sampling everything, we selected a fine herbed cheese. We bought some bread, plastic knives and sat by a canal and ate it.\

So Amsterdam is stunningly beautiful. Amazing.

Our next stop was to the Anne Frank House. So we walked there. It was stunning. Saw this on the way.

Oh look....

So this is the outside of the Anne Frank House. You can wait in line forever or you can just by your tickets online. We did that. We were a bit early so we went to a canalside cafe to get a coffee.

Here's the cafe. What a terrible view.

So, if you look closely, you can see a boat is coming under the bridge. The boats are huge and the canals are so so narrow. You'll see what I mean later.

So close! Okay, that was Amsterdam part one. Get ready for some more!

Where Are We?

So no, I didn't forget about you all. Mostly, me and iPad did not work out and I also had no way and no time really to update pictures and blog. Today, right now, is like the first time that I am not doing something. So, get ready, here comes some new stuff! But first, some left over France pictures....


Lauren disapproves of something. We were so tired here. We were sitting in the shade of a lamp post in hopes of getting some respite from the sun.

The sun in all its glory.

I am currently and still reading 1984.

This was our hotel room. It was awesome!

Fun France

Hello!

So my genius plan of ditching my computer and blogging from my iPad has a few kinks.  One big one being my memory on iPad is full of Grey's Anatomy, there is no room to upload any pictures from my camera. So I now have to post pictures to my blog from my phone, and then go add the comments on iPad. But that's okay, it keeps it interesting. It's also teaching to me type on iPad. And you thought that the typos were bad before!

So today, I am actually in Amsterdam but I can't show you my pictures from Amstedam for reasons I mentioned above and I have some pictures from the last few days in France. So Amsterdam update tomorrow and France update now.

So, Monday was still more apartment hunting. An oh, it was a thousand degrees outside. Like surface of the sun hot. I have never felt the energy of the sun until yesterday. Thank god that my shirt was quick dry.

Walking around, in the heat, we came across this hotel and bar.  I should stay here or at least imbibe something he sometime. How appropriate, right? Maybe we can come celebrate here when I finally find a place to live.

These pictures are a bit out of order, it was the best I could do, but here is the view from our hotel room.  I randomly choose a hotel somewhere in Paris because it was cheap and I needed it for my visa, but then I forgot to cancel it so we actually stayed there, which turned out to be the cutest neighborhood!

Saw this blue door and blue car. It needed to be captured for color alliteration or assonance sake.

Opp, here's another picture of my bar. Told you, out of order.

Alright, so that was Monday. We we're getting kicked out of the hotel on Tuesday so we needed a plan.  Stay in Paris and look for apartments that don't really exist yet because the entire country is still one vacation, or go on a trip ourselves and deal with important life things later. Well duh, leave! It actually wasn't that irresponsible, there really were no apartments to see until Monday so we split!

Thank god for my storage unit. Essentially, we have moved into that. Leaving our hotel for the storage unit to repack our bags so they were light!

Because these are way way too big! Remember, we have ones one the front too! That honestly was hard on the lungs.

Hmm...Walking to the storage unit.... It was HOT!

We repacked, picture to come, ditched th bags and explored. Lauren wants me to drink more water so here she is kindly refilling my water bottle.

We walked around a bit more before heading back to the station to catch our train to Amsterdam.

So to recap....typing on iPad sucks, France was hot, i still have no place to live, and now off to Amsterdam!

Nothing Really Exciting

So first off, sorry about all the typos, but I'm thinking that you got what I was saying. Proofreading really is a beautiful thing.... when you do it. Maybe today.

Currently, it's 4:30 in the morning. I am so tired at night yet wake up so so early. And then the vicious cycle continues. Either way, it's good for you all because when I wake up this early, I have time for an update!

Like the title says, to be honest, I have nothing exciting to report because really, everything that we have done the last two days had been..... BORING! Seriously, boring, but needed to get done.

Let's see, Sunday, went to church, walked around a bit exploring neighborhoods trying to get a feel for where is good place to live and where is not... oh wait! I have to tell about this! We accidentally ran into a rollerblading parade/race. One minute we're walking down the street the next were quickly bombarded by thousands of rollerbladers. And I do mean thousands. Lauren has a video which I must post later when I steal it from her phone. So that was pretty cool. Most things are closed on Sunday so the city is pretty dead so this was a nice surprise and livened things up a bit. We saw a Syria protest and then went and ate pizza. FYI, I love pizza so you're going to hear about it a lot.

Monday was really exhausting. An actual weekday so the apartment search began. Let's start by saying, this is not easy! Not at all. Another thing to point out..... I have never spoken this much french in my life! Normally I am with someone who speak wayyy better than I do so they talk. Not the case! I do all the talking and it is so good for me! In recap, we hit 5 rental agencies, 4 of which had no listings. I got a cell phone, we bought a train tickets, train discount cards, ate lunch, saw the opera house (that was actually fun), and then finally saw an apartment. Whew and my god we were exhausted. Barely made it to dinner... which was pizza. Don't worry, we ate french things for breakfast and lunch.

Anyway, not the most exciting two days but trying to keep you all up to date! But get excited.... on either Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on apartment viewings, Lauren and I are going to hit up Belgium and the Netherlands. Get pumped! You know who you are Belgian Waffle people.

Until then!

And I'm Here

So, after much anxiety... and I do mean much, it begins again.

Leaving Hawaii has not been easy and it's not because of its natural beauty but mostly because Hawaii was easy and Paris is hard. (See how I side stepped all that emotion.)

Anyway, I spent last week getting ready to leave for France, for those of you who don't know, I am going to grad school in Paris. Thank God, my best friend Lauren for some had a few free months in her life and was able to come with me. Seriously, I would probably be a puddle if I had to do this on my own. So Lauren and I took off, Friday morning from Honolulu headed to Paris.

With the exception of my wayyyy overpriced ticket, this may be the most that I have ever spent on an airline ticket, must be karma for all my past flight deals, the trip was not bad. One stop in LA and then Paris.

First flight was fine, a bit bumpy, which in my mind translates to "OMG I'm going to die! (I hate to fly.) Either way, Honolulu to LA is a quick 5h13 minute trip. Lauren slept and I watched Grey's Anatomy, my new obsession on my other new obsession, The (Work) iPad. Work bc it's my dad old iPad that I used to use for the table.

Anyway, the flights almost done, we're landing. To be honest, landing is my favorite part. It means the flight is over, your closer to the ground, and it just feels more controlled than random turbulence. However, I have one big fear of landing.... not including the newly produced one of low air speed that was created last month with the Asiana flight, but I digress. My fear came when I saw Natalie Portman on Jay Leno like 8 years ago. Yes, I have a great memory.

Natalie was flying into New York, the plane was about to land, something happened and then the flight had to take off suddenly. Now, talking about this doesn't seem that bad, but when I heard that I thought I would die if I was ever on a flight that did that.

Can you guess the next part of my story.

So Lauren is a corpse next to me, and net to her is this Army man in cammies. We're landing, we're landing, we're langing, and then we are NOT landing. No, instead we are shooting straight up into the sky like a spaceship. To be honest the verticalness of the angle was actually quite impressive. So of course, I being to freak out.... and where does my mind immediately and logically go? Well of course we are going to nosedive into the ocean! LAX is right on the water, we've now shot up an impressive amount up and over the Pacific, and of course the only place left to go is in.

This may shock you, but instead we just circled the airport and tried to land again, this time successfully, about 15 minutes later. We touch down, people clap, and Lauren wakes up. I don't remember exactly what she said, but it was something like, wow, it's nice that they are clapping because it was such a great flight.

Me and Army man quickly corrected her.Turns out, right when we were about to land, another airplane pulled out onto the runway we were landing on we had to pull up. So that was fun.

The we had to wait on the tarmac and then finally we got off that plane. The waiting wasn't great because on our next flight, Lauren and I didn't have seats together and we were trying to get to our next gate as soon as possible. We had a two hour connection and I will give you a hint, it took the full two hours.

LAX is already confusing enough, but one really annoying thing is that to change terminals, you usually have to leave security, and today was not exception. After making it to the line, a battle between Lauren and a girl from an eastern block country who kept cutting in front of us on the corners, which Lauren took as a personal challenge, serveral paparazzi trying to photograph who we would later find out was Tom Welling, we made it it our gate and learned that there was no way to change our seats. So we boarded.

Well, apparently everyone wanted to change seats to it was mad chaos on the plane. I switched twice, Lauren three times, and finally, this really nice guy next to me traded with Lauren! Yay!

Thank you church for the headphones! They are AMAZING!

Photo of Birmingham, England from the plane.

So, the flight was bumpy. And actually bumpy. Like really bumpy. But I think that its always pretty rough when you fly over the Atlantic, at least it has been for me in the past. We land, are the first people through customs and head to baggage claim where all of our bags come, including my giant one, except for my one black one. Excellent.

Turns out it was in the oversized baggage place,not exactly sure why. We loaded it all into a taxi and head for.... the storage unit! Currently, I have no where to live, so everything but that green backpack is going into storage.

We hit up the storage unit, I do it all in French! Yeah baby, the man in incredibly nice, the place is huge, awesome! We metro to our hotel, which turns our is in this awesome and incredibly cute neighborhood, the hotel is awesome, and we got have a drink. I wish I had more picture but I don't.... tom morrow.

We walked around, ate dinner, then we died. SO much in one day! And now I write to you at 6am from my bathroom, as Lauren is sleeping, with this view

Picking back up.....

So getting back on the travelling track, things are about to get busy. I leave for France in less than two months and have no shortage of tasks to get done before my departure date, August 30.

One big step in this whole process is I think, getting my visa. The I think comes from no one ever telling me that I actually need a visa as well as my school only emailing me once since I got accepted. But going off of that information, I think it's reasonable to get a visa considering I will, in theory, be out of the country for 15 months.

Well, getting a french visa is an almost endless task but the final step after tons of paperwork is getting the actual visa.Normally, once would just go to their closest consulate and pick one up. However, my closest consulate happens to be in San Francisco, California. Right next door. Honestly, even LA would have been way better. But no, San Cisco, here we come.

Who is the We? Well, I found out that this trip was happening about 5 days before it actually happened. I asked Marisa to come and after some careful deliberation on her part, she came into my room at midnight and declared, "I come." My first thought was, "Where?" But after a few seconds figured it out.

So, without further ado, I present to you, "Marisa and Brittany Go to California."

Start of Summer!

So I'm still in Hawaii! Cool. No but really, the days are ticking down and I'm starting to get really, really nervous. But that's okay. For those of you who are late to the game, I'm moving to France in October for school. At least that's the plan, the school likes me but we still have to see if France will let me in.

Before that though, I have a bunch of places to see and lots of things to do! Hitting up California twice this summer before heading off with Lauren in September to do putz around Europe. That should be fun! And I bet the stories will be even better.

Summer is Here! Which I am pumped about! If only it would stop raining. We have had more rain in the last few months than I bet we normally see in a year. A lot!

Some things that have been going on... I did another Table, big success, super fun and stressful. Marisa graduated, very cool. Been hanging out with my peeps a lot. In fact, here's some pictures from the sunset the other day. Oh, before that, get pumped! I got a new camera. Hopefully, this one will do it's job in making take amazing pictures because without its help, I am essentially the worst photographer ever. You be the judge. Check back, I'm trying to keep up with this thing again!

This is me drinking sangria. For someone who doesn't really like sangria, I sure order it a lot. 

 I drove up to the west side of the island with two friends to meet up with another friend who lives in "Paradise."

 Here's a bunch of the sunset. It was beautiful!