I am so far behind, I know.  But the combination of having basically no wifi in Greece, and having some freelance work that has taken up some of my computer time means that I am like 3 cities behind.  But now we’re in Tuscany for the next two weeks so I should have plenty of time to catch up!  So on to Utrecht. This one is a little bit of a story, but hopefully you find our misery entertaining.

We flew from Basel, Switzerland to Amsterdam, and not wanting to stay in Amsterdam since we had already been there and wanted something not quite as busy, we chose Utrecht.  It was close to Amsterdam so we could go in to town when we wanted to, and I found a nice looking apartment in airbnb for pretty cheap.

We arrived pretty late in Utrecht, and had to walk from the train station.  Things weren’t looking good. The apartment was in an industrial-ish area, and the building it was in was less than desirable. But we really didn’t have an option at this point.  The host, Justus, let us in and we were even more disappointed.  If you’re familiar with airbnb, listings are either categorized as “entire place” or “private room”.  Being a couple in our 30s, we were always looking for entire place, and this place was advertised as such.  When we walked in, we realized it was this guys 2 bedroom apartment that was essentially just sectioned off to be two, with a shared hallway.  This meant that to get to the restroom, we had to leave our room and enter the hallway area where Justus could see us.  Not only am I too old for that nonsense, with just a backpack it’s not like I had full pajamas packed, so this was definitely an issue for me.  In the back of my mind I knew that the listing had “flexible” terms, which meant we could be refunded if we left early, so I wasn’t to worried about it.  I thought I could suck it up, but things just kept getting worse, and we were supposed to spend 5 nights there.

First, the toilet.  I hate to get graphic, but this part is important to the rest of the story.  The toilet looked like it was installed backwards, with what we jokingly ended up calling a “poop shelf”.  Instead of everything falling into water, it would sit on this shelf until you flushed, which meant a pretty terrible smell in the tiny closet of a bathroom.  Not to mention that it opened up onto the shared hallway.  It was rough.  We’d seen some questionable toilets in Europe, but this took the cake.  Then, the next morning, and through some of the night, we kept hearing crashing bottles outside our window.  We realized we were right above a recycling center, which meant people tossing their recycled bottles in a metal bin that was about 15 feet deep causing them to crash at the bottom.  It kept us up half the night and woke us up in the morning, and then the trucks came to empty them at like 6am.  That was it, we were done.

So I went to the airbnb app to message the guy (who was most likely just down the hall) that we would only be staying one more night and would have to leave.  But first, both of us ran to the restroom and did our business so that we wouldn’t have the chance to awkwardly run into him again.  This backfired immediately.  About 2 minutes after sending him the message, he knocked on the door, and Matt had to go talk to him in said stinky hallway.  Justus was not happy.  He said that he would not refund us the entire amount, that we would have to spilt the difference.  He claimed that the policy was that we had to cancel 24 hours before the reservation.  Matt, having not really known the policy that I had just read and double checked, tried to argue with him but didn’t really know what to say, while trying to ignore the hallway filled with poop shelf odor.  I could hear the conversation, but was not fully dressed and the door was wide open so there wasn’t much I could do to aid him.  Matt finally awkwardly retreated back to our room, where I explained to him that we were in the right, and promptly messaged Justus again.  He replied pretty quickly that he had no idea that that was his policy (sucks for you dude) and that he would honor our request.  I felt bad for like 5 minutes, but was quickly confirmed in our decision with more shattering bottles outside and continued poop shelf smell.

We made the right decision.  In the next post you’ll see the adorable place we went to next.

But in the meantime, we made the most of Utrecht.  The town is adorable when you’re in the right areas, with Amsterdamesque canals and restaurants, without the Amsterdam chaos.  We did go to Amsterdam for a meal and to walk around, but were quickly shocked by our recollection of it.  As young “kids” mystified by all that is Amsterdam, we remembered it being much smaller and quaint, but once there it just felt like another dirty tourist trap of a large city that we couldn’t wait to get out of.  Oh how times change.

Sorry this was such a long post, but these mishaps are really what make traveling what it is.  Below are some of our fun times in Utrecht, more to come on Holland tomorrow!