Masterdam

hey guys, thanks for the love. its real appreciated. so heres the current update, its sept. 27th 9:05pm and we are here at palmer's lodge in London. its a real cool spot, we're diggin it. but so a little update for y'all and oh boy its quite an update.

we'll start with amsterdam. we spent bout a total of three and a half days there, stayed at the shelter city hostel right in on the edge of the red light. really great hostel, would recommend it to anyone. it was a christian hostel, bumping christian tunes in the speakers just about all day, so it was a real beautiful deal. so first full day in amsterdam, dizz and I get up have some breaky and take to the streets for some walking. we walked all over town checking out the red light district during the day, seeing all the "coffee" shops and all the crazy sex shops and what not along the way. amsterdam is a real beautifully historic place, with all the channels and tiny streets, all the bikers and old buildings. it was great getting a feel for the city just by walking. so later that night we headed back to the hostel for a bible study they hold every night. we sat in and after i got to talking to this amazing, beautiful bronze babe named szvipka (not quite sure on the spelling). she was from germany and was working at a community, almost salvation army like, in the red light. she was a real awesome woman, fired up about faith and serving. our kinda gal. dizz got talkin to this californian mug, steve, a wine maker. he was quite the character, great guy though. so after chatting it up with our new friends for a little, we thought why not check out the night scene in the red light. its straight up wild. the partying, prostitution, smell of weed every where you go, its quite the scene. we checked it out for a little while and then called it a night. day two of amsterdam, me and case heard from steve about this museum park that was suppose to be pretty cool to check out. so we head out, i kinda forget what happened but we decided to say screw it and head back to the hostel to figure out our plans. on our way, by some kind of miracle, we run into our wonderful buddy szvipka and catch as she headed out to the anne frank house. se we decide to head out there with her. we were really glad to see it, its a powerful place. later that night we had some good ole amsterdamian classic pannecoken and call it a day. day three we get up early and buy some bus tickets over to london. we head out to were the bus station is and hang at a park for some time while we what for our bus. what happens next is where it gets pretty wild. gonna post this email case wrote to descibe it to you....

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Bonjour!

Haha as you might guess Phenz and I are in France right now. We are staying in a cheap hotel in a little town called Calais. Calais? You might ask! Thats exactly what I said to the UK Border Patrol officer as she told us that we would be denied entrance into the UK. That being said I guess I need to fill in some blanks. Phenz and I had planned to go to London after our stay in Amsterdam. So we booked a couple of bus tickets and took off. Everything was going smoothly. We had a hostel booked for four nights in London followed by a plain ticket to Manchester where we would meet Dean King who generously invited us into his flat. All this until we were hauled into detainment at 4 am. There we would stay for the next 9 hours. We were each questioned separately by one of the Queens finest border patrol officers, followed by a long session of fingerprinting. Needless to say the UK was quite questionable on the matter of our visit! Once the decision had been made that we weren't going to be aloud in we were escorted back to france by two fine young French law officers and thrown into jail. (Not really though... we were only in there for 30 min. :) I'll show you some picks we captured though, pretty funny). Anyway when we got out of there we were escorted of the police property and dumped at a bus station. Funny how life goes sometimes!

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wild stuff. we bounced back though. we stayed in a cheap hotel in calais for the night and woke up in the morning caught a ferry over to dover in the UK. got through costumes with absolutely no problem. we almost got through without showing any papers and without them even knowing that we were denied to their country yesterday, which kinda makes our fiasco yesterday a little questionable. we got off the ferry took a bus to london and now here we are. un-phased by UK border control and loving life and loving london. so the plan is we are here for the next four days then headed up to chesterville (manchester) to stay with one of caseys family friends for five days. and then we've got tickets to paris. so thats that folks, we dearly miss you all. we love seeing your posts and would love to hear how your doin and how life is back home. we're off to bed here pretty soon, we're pretty spent after the lot we've been through. take care pals, you're in our thoughts and prayers. you have our love.

BLESSINGS,

Casey and Josh