Amsterdam Hitch - Hitching!

I realise i've been neglecting my blog for the last couple of months and theres way too much thats been happening to play catch up. Therefore i'm just going to ignore the last 2 weeks worth of work, parties and lectures as well as the whole christmas/new year period (which was really nice, seeing friends in both Prague and Brno, and relaxing at home enjoying both the christmas atmosphere and really good food which I didn't have to cook).

Over the christmas holiday I was raising money for two charities. The first was the Chernobyl Children's Project which runs medical centres and orphanages in Belarus to provide care for children affected by the Chernobyl disaster as well as giving them the opportunity to go to countries such as the UK for a holiday to escape the radiation for a period of time. The second charity was the Orphan Aid Association which raises funds for an orphanage in Romania, providing food, medical care, clothing and staff for the children at the orphanage. I managed to raise the £150 I needed to do the hitch so Thursday at around 1pm we started our curbside wait presenting our perfectly crafted signs (two pieces of card, one emblazoned with the words Charity hitch and the other saying Hull) and getting laughed at by various drivers as they sped past. After about an hour we moved onto somewhere further into Leeds, a bit past the centre towards the motorway. Having not hitchiked before and since we had to be in Hull at a set time to catch the ferry we were a bit nervous, worrying that we may not actually manage to hitch a ride (which would result in us being forced to resort to paying for a bus or train). Luckily after about half an hour of waiting we got a ride from a friendly student going to work somewhere roughly mid way between Leeds and Hull. This then meant we had to hitchike again from the town he was working in, which luckily only meant about half an hour of crisp eating and random song singing. The second hitch took us to somewhere just off another small town on the way to Hull which meant waiting for another hitch. This time we got a ride pretty quickly, maybe 15 minutes or so of waiting, from what we guessed was a gardener since he had various gardening equipment in his car. He was really friendly, telling us about the fact that he used to hitch and so, knowing what its like waiting for ages on the roadside, he had stopped for us. He even took us right up to the dock.

We had to wait quite a while before being able to board the ferry. It was weird being on a ferry again since I hadn't been on one in years and it was quite different to the ferries of my childhood memories. The time on the ferry was really fun. I shared a room with 3 people I didn't know (since they split us up into boys' and girls' cabins and i'm the only boy in my hitching group) and my 3 cabin mates and their hitching partners were all really nice. It felt like I was on a school trip.

Once we made it across the channel to Belgium (it was an overnight ferry) we found ourselves in quite a bleak port town (Belgium's equivalent to Hull it seemed). From there we had trouble getting a hitch as it was a relatively quiet place. In the end we somehow ended up managing to hitch a free train ride to Amsterdam by confusing the train's ticket inspector (unintentionally of course!). When he asked for our tickets we tried to explain to him that we were doing a charity hitchike and therefore could he allow us to have a free train ride. He seemed to misunderstand, enquiring instead if we were saying he'd already checked our tickets. So we said yes and he moved onto the next people, therebye granting us a free journey. So we ended up making it to Amsterdam with most of a day to explore the city!