Amsterdam. What an experience. It feels like wenwere there for like 5 days, partially because we walked so much. (I need to stop here and just point out that it's a good thing cities are so walkable, because we are eating SO MUCH food. I'd be fat as a dumpling by the end of the first week otherwise.)
When we first got into the city, it was raining. We had about four hours of sleep on that hot as hell sleeper train which was otherwise pretty cool (more on that later), no mapexcept the general one in our guidebook, no grasp of the dutch language, and our luggage. Tristan had found our hostel on the guidebook map, the little house symbol with a 14 in it. So we go southeast of station amsterdam centraal, and end up smack dab in the middle of the redlight district. Where we then preceded to wander for about an hour and a half. We asked a few people if they'd heard of our hostel's street, including this big gay American dude who said "just have a space cake honey, and you won't even care!" Welcome to Amsterdam, huh? Eventually this lady told me the vondelpark was in the south part of the city, which we knew, but figured our hostel name, stayokay vondelpark, was just a name. As it turns out our wandering among the shady alleys of the red light district were in vain, because the guide book has 2 little houses with 14's in them. And the other one, the real one, as I quickly discovered, was next to the entrance to vondelpark. Go figure. We figured out roughly how to take the tram, and hopped aboard to watch the stores and restaurants get ritzier and ritzier, as we headed south. By the time we got off at the park and walked the lovely shaded street to the hostel along the park, we were relieved beyond all words to be staying in a gorgeous, high-class, and above all safe & quiet neighborhood. But we were also soaked, exhausted, dirty, and still in sweatpants from the train. In other words, pissed off and hating Amsterdam already.
But it gets better! Once we settled in and relaxed for a bit I thought it might be a good idea to spend the rest of the rainy afternoon in the van gogh museum. We ate somehing other than snack food for the first time in about 20 hours or more, and I finally got my salad (fresh buffalo mozzerella and balsamic - so good I even ate all the tomatoes!). I've never seen anyone eat a turkey club as fast as Tristan ate his.
The van gogh museum was pretty good, lots of paintings I've only seen books or art history lectures. I've realized that I don't hate painting museums if I know the history and the stories behind everything, and the van gogh had just the right amount of info to keep me interested in the story of his life through his art without feeling like homework.
We spent the rest of the evening walking around and seeing the city which feels smaller than Copenhagen area-wise. It has a very different feel from Copenhagen too, it's much more clustered amd bustling, with lots of alley ways and shopping stores, and dudes offering me cocaine on the street (no thanks) and lots more chain stores. Seriously the main shopping street is like strøget times 100, the stores actually repeat 2 or 3 times because it's so long and has so many stores.
And the city itself! I have been trying to figure out how to describe accurately how it made us feel. I don't think words will suffice, so just know that everything I am about to say is not exaggerating our opinion at all, and just try to imagine what it was like for the two of us. It seems as though whoever was in charge of designing the transit/pedestrian system for the city tasked out separate people to design each of the bike, side walk, tram, and car areas, and those people weren't allowed to talk to each other before they turned in their plans. A typical street crossing experience went like this:
Look for the color change in the brick to indicate start of bike lane. Look both ways 4 times for bikers. Cross quickly to the first island, press pedestrian crossing button. Wait til the first walk light goes on. Check for cars, run across street. Check for trams in both directions. Sprint across tram tracks to next island. Wait for next walk light to change, run across road to final median island. Remember to check for bikes again, this isn't the side walk! Run across final bike lane, make sure you're actually on the sidewalk, and then stop and take a breather while you figure out where you've ended up as you rub your neck which is now experiencing a minor case of whiplash from all the checking left and right you just had to do. Complain to travel buddy about how incredibly FRUSTRATING this city is.
More often than not that's how it went, and we absolutely hated tha aspect of the city, especially coming from Copenhagen where they've got a system that works smoothly without question, and without requiring an adderol first and a neckbrace after.
Having said all that, we did like Amsterdam. It's a very prety city, TONS of canals that make hundreds of little island blocks, and all the houseboats tristan could ever want. We went on a canal tour our first morning there, at heather's suggestion, and we got to see the whole city and all the gorgeous townhouses and bridges, plus some architecture and city history. We got to do the rest of the things on our agenda for the city, which consisted of the heineken brewery, fries, and cheese. So far so good on the beer-cheese-chocolate tour. (By the time we left Copenhagen I had had so much cocio I couldn't even finish it all, and Tristan was inclined to comment more than once "I can't even comprehend the amount of chocolate you've ingested, I've never seen anything like it!")
We were looking for something to do when we happened to run into the two swedish guys from our car on the overnight train, who we'd decided were funny and more our style to hang out with than the two 17 year old girls from Finland. They were on their way to the anne frank house, which we weren't plannig to go to because it's depressing, but we went along anyway because it made sense. I'm really glad we did go, because it was amazing to hear the frank family story, and see the actual places they hid out. At the end they had an area with short videos describing various modern day descriminations, and then they would electronically poll the visitors with buttons on the seats. It then showed the results in a pie chart and compared them with all visitors' results. It was really interesting, and a great point in my opinion, to juxtapose historical descriminations with modern day ones, and to point out the fact that, like Otto frank said, (anne's father,) people need to remember that there are horrible things like this going on even today, and that because we know it happened once doesn't mean it can't happen again.
Last night after the anne frank museum we hung out with oskar and pete in the city, and then headed home because we had to get up early this morning (REALLY early thanks to the bleach-blond girl in our room who sounded like she packed everything in cellophane and spent at least 30 minutes in the early hours cramming about 20 wooden clogs (klompen!) into one of her 3 suitcases.
Well, writing this on my phone has taken the entire 2 hour train ride, I'll post it when I find internet in Brussels.
