While we were in Amsterdam a few days ago, Andree and I had both tried to purchase my Jacket with our credit cards, to our shock, the machine said “Not Accepted” to both of our cards – how could this be?  Andrée and I both found that very strange – I thought maybe it was because they didn’t like Canadians but I guess it goes a little further than that.

Later on that night we went to an Indonesian restaurant with our friends Maggie and Axel.  Andrée had tried to pay with her credit card and the machine said the same thing, “Not Accepted”.  By this point Andrée was terribly worried and tried desperately to put on her “Sherlock Holmes hat” to start investigating, since it was late at night we decided it was best to not put “hat” on until the next day.

We made our way to a tourism booth the next day to get tickets to the Heineken Tour.  While we were at the tourism booth we noticed they had payphones.  Andrée had her list of phone numbers written down and was eager to crack the case of “The Compromised Credit Cards”.  Andrée ended up having to purchase a 10 euro phone card to make the collect call to North America – by this point, she was not impressed.   Andrée got a hold of a representative for CIBC after a long stage of trial-and-error-dialing.  The man asked her if she purchased gas in the United States recently.  A shock rose to her face as she stared blankly into nothingness, her heart skipped a beat as she spoke softly and replied “uhhmmm… no I’m in France”.  The representative quickly canceled her Visa account and suggested that she contact Visa for any further emergency funds and/or card.

Now this had me a little bit worried, I decided to go online to check my Visa transactions and sure enough, someone had purchased something from a Wal-Mart in Arizona – it was probably someone from www.peopleofwalmart.com.  I phoned up Visa right away and the lady asked “So you want to cancel your card?” and I replied with “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when someone steals it?  I mean, I can’t use it anyways cause it’s on hold.”, she said “Well, yes most of the time we cancel them”.  I was shocked and blurted “Yes! I want you to cancel my card!” DERRRR.  So here we are, back in Reims without any credit cards.  Thank god we can still take out money with our debit cards.

This wasn’t our entire Amsterdam trip, we had an amazing time.  We will write a full post about it soon!