AMSTERDAM, Thurs 3/17-3/19: death by bikes

My sincere apologies for taking absolutely forever to update my blog, as this is a month overdo. I've been quite busy with traveling on weekends, schoolwork and all, but also trying to accomplish the feat of writing about my spring break has been quite intimidating as I anticipate this could take quite some time. With that, this chapter of my travels is the start of my spring break and the first city that I visited with my friend Courtney (from Marist): AMSTERDAM!!!

My travels actually began that Wednesday where I took the train down to Rome as we were catching a 9:15am flight out of the Rome Fiumicino airport as the Florence airport is very small and Pisa is just an absolute pain to get to especially with an early flight. After landing in Amsterdam, my first impression of the city was that it had an odd hint of horse manure in the air, and not just right outside the train station, but in all parts of the city. A little odd, but something we got used to after a while and hardly noticed. Our first stop in this brand new city was not to see the Anne Frank house, the Van Gogh museum, or even the Heineken factory, but it was to track down and target the nearest Starbucks in the city. Fortunately this was not to incredibly difficult as the moment we left security at the airport there was one eying me down no more then 50feet away. Being in the States, I do love my Starbucks, grabbing a grande caramel iced coffee (with free refills thanks to my gold card status :D) and sitting on the comfy jumbo chairs with a book or homework is one of my favorite study spots, but I haven't missed it too much as I've been quite taken to the Italian espresso and cappuccino. But, it must have slipped my mind how much I truly missed Starbucks until on the plane Courtney expressed her enthusiasm to snag a Chai Latte in Amsterdam....man do I absolutely love Iced Chai Tea Lattes.

*photo cred goes to Google search engine

Cooling off with one of those following our plane ride, we tracked down the tram we had to take, and got to our hostel, Hostel Janson, on the other side of town, very close actually to the museum district and the I AMsterdam sign. Very quaint hostel, had all the amenities, perhaps a little out of the way from certain things, but everything went smoothly here. Our first stop was the I AMsterdam sign where we took our touristy pictures (in Firenze I have made every attempt to mold into the culture of a local, but prior to departure I set those ambitions aside as I knew I was going to be the quintessential tourist on this trip), and then grabbed some lunch from a near by stand. Perhaps one of the greatest sandwiches I have ever had, basically a Salami sandwich with a salad on it where the cucumbers just yielded such an intense wonderful flavor.

For the sake of minimizing the amount of words/sentences I use in order to not go crazy on every little detail I figure I'll list out the sights we saw for the day and then elaborate after; not sure how well this will work, but I'm quite interested to see how this works: Canal Tour, RijksMuseum, Dinner, Dam Square, Hostel. The canal tour was quite fun, it wasn't the clearest of days, but I found that there aren't too many clear days in Amsterdam, let alone warm ones as it was absolutely frigid in the city. The boat ride was lovely as we were able to see the majority of the city in an hour and a half, was able to take a fantastic amount of pictures, and was able to see the really amazing architecture of the city. Perhaps my favorite city for architecture, yes Prague/Budapest was more intricate and elegant but Amsterdam had such a charm to it and really reminded me of what my my notions of a world war city looked like. The RijksMuseum, the National Museum of Amsterdam was a pretty phenomenal museum and definitely worth the visit. It held a vast collection of artwork from Rembrandt, Vermeers, the stern of the HMS Royal Charles, and for whatever reason, quite the collection of Asian art. Again, definitely worth the visit even if you're tight for time as it really only took a little over an hour to see. But one thing I did notice in Amsterdam is that it completely depleted my Euros in my wallet as we saw quite a number of museums and they charge a very very hefty penny for them, as the cheapest was 10euro for a museum I found. For dinner, as my guidebook only covered Prague, Budapest and Berlin (the latter would be saved for a future trip), we tracked down a typical dutch cuisine restaurant where I held my head high and ordered the "Tourist Dinner." I typically make every effort possible to not make such a rookie mistake as this, but the items just seemed so appealing and for not that expensive of a price. It included fried mussels (mhmmm so good), chicken soup, tropical fruit tea, french fries, peas/carrots, and a salad. Courtney's dish was also very interesting as she got a raisin and wine pancake (apparently the dutch love their pancakes!) which was good but tasted like the raisins had merely soaked in the wine rather then soak in the flavor of it.

Typical tourist pic atop the I AMsterdam sign

Following dinner we walked through Dam Square, would see more of it the following day, the main square of Amsterdam that includes a giant WWII monument, a Madam Toussands, and just a lot of activity. Exhausted from our trip we walked back to the hostel, met these three kids from Oxford and I must say, even though I haven't met too many people from Oxford and Cambridge, the ones I have met from Oxford are quite a bit snobbier then Cambridge, so props to you Kristen for choosing the superior school. This was mainly identified when they stuck their nose up when I mentioned my sister went to Cambridge and I was pretty excited for the Cambridge/Oxford crew race in the upcoming week. Oh well, they eventually departed and we planned out our day for the following day and went to sleep.

Upon waking up we had to move to another hostel as our original one was booked for that night. Although it was quite the hike and we were just getting used to our bags, the hostel was right next door to the Anne Frank house. Oh and to stick to my routine of listing off everything we did in order and then elaborating more on it, which I think worked quite well for the previous day, our events included: Anne Frank House, Van Gogh museum, dinner, and Dave Plotz. Anne Frank was incredible, being a History major focused in German history and the world wars, this was my first real taste of the effects of world wars. The self-guided tour was great, it provided a detailed step by step description of the Frank family and what life was like living in the attic. It was interesting though how they didn't have any furniture remaining in the house as the Nazis cleared it out after their invasion and Otto Frank wanted to leave it as it was when the Nazis came in in order to preserve the memory of the devastation.

Following the Anne Frank house, we made an attempt to visit the Van Gogh museum, but somehow me managed to make the wrong turn, end up in Volks Park, a very beautiful park with a giant pond in the middle, where Court misread the map of the park and believed we were on the South end rather then the North. We ended up walking through the entire park, ended up on the very corner edge of my huge map of Amsterdam but was fortunate to find a very pleasant flower man who gave us directions to take the tram to the museum. After that little communication error, we were able to tour the biggest collection of Van Gogh works in the world, a real treat and great experience as you were really able to tell how his works evolved over the years. In addition, there was an entire exhibit on Picasso when he painted in Paris which was very interesting as there were numerous similarities between the two revolutionary artist's works.

No real significance, just a bear blowing bubbles

Evidently, walking and getting lost in the park really didn't restrict us from accomplishing anything we wanted for the day (had anticipated doing the Heineken Brewery tour but that could be pushed back to the following morning), so we grabbed some dinner at just a simple cafe nearby, had a chicken salad and Court continued her trend of pancakes, this time having an apple was. The real showcase for the night was meeting up with Kristen's friend from Columbia, Dave Plotz, who happened to be in Amsterdam at the same time after spending some time in Paris the week prior. After spending the past few months with the same guys, who I still have an excellent time with, it was great to be able to change up the scene a little. Also, it's been since I believe Katie's wedding was the last time I saw Mr. Plotz so it was a grand ole' time seeing how he's been doing, sharing embarrassing stories about Kristen, and listening to his talks/views on the Sarah Palin in Alaska show. After swinging through a few pubs, we ventured off to see the infamous Red Light District of Amsterdam, a very interestingly humorous sight. The streets were absolutely packed with tourists, whore houses, and oddly enough, a massive amount of swans just relaxing and swimming around the canal that separated the two streets. What was also interesting was the fact that right when you leave the district, the neighborhood around it was actually very residential and looked quite wealthy. A very unique/great sense of humor, has no issue continuously talking for hours on end about politics, Russia, travels, etc. it was really great having the chance to enjoy Dave's presence for the evening, but with that we departed after the district and returned back to our hostel to catch up on some needed sleep.

Our trip in Amsterdam was quickly coming to a close as our flight to Prague was later that afternoon, so I had to obviously squeeze in the tour of Heineken into my itinerary in order to complete my checklist of all the sights I desired to see in this wonderful city of canals. One thing to take note of though is that it doesn't open until 11am, which left me wondering around the nearby parks for over an hour wishing I had taken that hour to sleep. Never having been to a brewery, the 15euro cost was more justifiable (at least in my mind) and not to mention we had a 4-D tour of the brewing process that reminded me an awful lot of the Bug's Life ride in Disney World, a whopping 13years ago. Also, as a college student I felt slightly obligated to stray away from the intellectual/artsy aspects of the city and adventure into the stereotypical college scene of beer and breweries.

After Heineken, we grabbed our things from the hostel and still had an hour or so to kill so we ventured to Dam Square where there were some jolly protesters of all different sorts scurrying around the square, ranging from gay rights, to animal rights, to woman's rights, making it all appear extremely organized at first, but once you were amongst them you were just confused as to what was going on. We finished up the day with Court and myself buying a few souvenirs, with mine being the fine purchase of a giant basket of cheese fries! The airport was then calling our name, so we said goodbye to this fantastic city, bought another Iced Chai Tea Latte for the road, and ventured off to our next journey.

Photo of the Canals, architecture, and a bike

Just a few of my thoughts I had on the city, a brief overview of it in case there are those who merely skimmed to the bottom to read the conclusion (if that is the case, hopefully my conclusion will prove to be worthwhile and worth the trip of scrolling back up to the top of the page to continue your reading). Simply put, it was an incredible city, one of my favorite that I've been to thus far. A few variables may have influenced this opinion as this was in fact the first leg of our journey so I wasn't overly tired yet and still had a reasonable amount of money to spend. Yet, this was probably best it was the first leg as I spent nearly twice as much here as the other cities on our Spring Break trip as things here were just remarkably/ridiculously expensive. As I have really grown to love and appreciate fine architecture over this semester, Amsterdam was really phenomenal in that aspect as everything was not say as elegant/intricate as Prague/Budapest, but just the feel of it and how everything looked/reminded me of a WWII era video footage or video games (callofduty to be exact), I just really fell in love with the fantastic buildings. Not to mention that the canals only amplified how truly beautiful this city is, with houseboats, birds afloat, and thousands of bikes traveling along the edges of the canal. I would definitely love to go back, especially during the summer months where I could have the opportunity to travel through the Holland countryside with all the tulip fields.