July 25th- This was the record breaking day for high temperature and we had an all day scavenger hunt to do and it was great! Yes, the humidity was close to 50% and it was close to 100 degrees, and I was sticky and sweaty, but I had an amazingly sweaty day! We met Meredith Glaser in the morning to go over our PUMA scavenger hunt (sorry, I forgot what PUMA stood for). We had to go to the city center, the pre-war, and the post-war areas of Amsterdam for our scavenger hunt. My group, Kelsey and Ryan, and I decided to ditch our bikes and only walk and take public transit. Starting off at 9:30am, we were super motivated to be the winning team and get every “mission” done, but I have to say towards the hottest part of the day, we started fading. Our first stop was out to Osdorp, which is in the post-war area of Amsterdam. This means it is further away from the city center and the developments are all from 1950s and later. To me, this area seemed to be where lower income people lived. I mainly saw, what looked like to be, immigrants and an older population. We took an Uber from here to the pre-war area and talked with our driver. He was originally an immigrant from India, but has lived here for 35 years. He said he never bikes, only drives and uses the metro because he lives out near Osdorp. He also said that he use to live in the city center, but parking was to expensive so he left. We then went to the museum park and talked to different families about what mode of transportation they used to get there and Kelsey attempted to ride Dutch with a stranger. The museum park had a big shallow pool of water, so we cooled off our feet in it. By this time, it was getting extremely hot, so we went to the hotel to get our swimming gear and went to FC Hyena, in Nord, which you take a ferry too, to swim. Here we cooled off and even got the opportunity to see a boat capsize. I think this night, when we got back, I hand-washed some clothes because I needed underwear. I thought to myself as I put the underwear out to dry on the balcony, “There is no way it will rain or get windy enough to blow my clothes away.” Well, I was wrong. I woke up at 4am to one of the loudest lightning strikes I have heard and the sound of rain flooding our balcony. I ran out there to grab my now soaking wet clothes and realized a pair of underwear had mysteriously gone missing.

July 26th- The first order of business was to find the missing underwear, but I was unsuccessful. Next, was a 10am meeting with Meredith for a debrief of our scavenger hunt and a bike tour. We originally were going to debrief first, but since it was going to be another hot day, we went out and did the bike tour first. Then we came back to the university do to a debrief of the scavenger hunt. Meredith was the last of the badass professionals we would meet with on this trip, well besides seeing Ronald again, but he is more like family! I feel so grateful to have met so many people passionate about making the world a better place through sustainable transportation. It was so inspirational for me and I feel extremely lucky to have had all these opportunities. Later this day, at 4:30pm, we went on a Red Light District tour. Not a whole lot to report back on that. It was very informative and our tour guide was very funny, but it still hasn’t changed my mind around the fact that it is really sad to see those women there selling there bodies. Edit: I forgot to say, I did end up finding my underwear stuck in a tree below the balcony. Sean was down there on the phone as was able to jump up and grab them. Hoooray!