February the Fourth, 2013

It was an early rise this morning, despite my lack of sleep the previous night, due to an impending checkout time. By 11 we were all checked out and set off for our new hostel St Christopher’s Inn at the Winston. It was a quick, but welcome, walk through a sunny Amsterdam morning.

 Once there we did all our paperwork but we couldn’t check-in till 2pm. Faced with renting lockers for our stuff we embarked back to the bulldog getting breakfast along the way. The place we stopped at was called Coffee Company and it seems to be one of the main coffee house chains around here. Coffee and muffin were both adequate. Once we got back to the bulldog, we dropped our big packs off in the checking out coatroom. The Bulldog franchise’s first coffee shop was just down the street so we went there for some coffee cake muffins. Heading next to the Grey Area to chill we hung out there for a bit before heading outside, at first to leave, but quickly to sit in the sun by the canal and read. 

Pat finished “Hitch 22”, Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, and has gifted it to me. Hitchens’ is an amazing writer and his life is a more then adequate story in it’s own right. This made reading outside the Grey Area a wonder filled experience. Around 1:30 we were getting a tad chilly from the wind and we headed to the bulldog to fetch our stuff before check-in. Once we were checked in we relaxed and acclimated ourselves to the new home. After a few hours we went to checkout the hostels common room and decided to get food. Burger Bar again, love that place.

We return to the hostel and the ritual along with it. Relaxing and chilling on our computers. This has become a fairly large portion of some of my days, a portion I was somewhat unsure of it. Today I reveled in it. As much as I use this ritual down time to catch up on my favorite tv shows, I find it best when filled with words. I am loving keeping in touch with people through the extended form. Whether that be through this blog or through what my friend Laura has so quaintly, yet accurately discribed as becoming a "pen pals".

Instant messaging chat’s are fine but writing to people is fascinating. As anyone who has had to edit my writing will attest to, my writing style is fairly unique. I sit down and try to write what pops into my head. Now it isn’t as random as all that but I battle I try to simultaneously plan out the direction it will take and how to make the words as palatable as possible. I often have to write notes for things I want to say later in a paragraph because I don’t want to jostle the train of thought.

This is all to say that writing isn’t always easy for me but I find great beauty in words. These blog posts and emails give me a chance to center myself, and get lost in the moment of creating the most beautiful wording I can think of to describe my thoughts, a chance much missed in instant messaging. Between my writing and my reading I am finding myself wrapped up in beautiful words. An added bonus is due to jet lag my internal clock has gone a bit wonky and I am able to type these to my hearts content into the night. I do hope the reader enjoys my prose as much as I enjoyed writing them. And feel free to email me, though I may take a while to respond.