Amsterdam

Amsterdam is a wonderland. We arrived in Amsterdam and found our hostel which we actually had not reserved for that night , so we walked down the street to another hostel which offered a private room for a pretty good price. The hostels in Amsterdam are quite different because where most have a common room to hangout on the ground floor, this hostel had a straight up Irish Pub. We grabbed a few Heinekens, which is brewed in Amsterdam and actually doesn’t taste terrible and headed out to a local coffee to grab a cup of joe. We then went around Amsterdam to check out the night life. Amsterdam has something for every desire. They have streets full of stores which sell kebabs, ice cream, pastries, pizza, hamburgers( out of vending machine), Chinese, Indian, Dutch and any other possible type of food you could possibly want, except for Mexican food which was strangely missing. The food was incredible and looked like something straight from the states. I am telling you that the locals would be the fattest people in the world except for the fact that they bike everywhere, which I will explain later. Pat continued his quest for a good deal on a kebab. Every store we walked to he would walk in check out the price walk out. After about 4 stops he walked into a store came out and said , “Well this is by far the lowest price I’ve found, but let’s keep looking” . When we eventually found a kebab that was to Pats liking he chowed down and spilled a good portion on his shirt.

We made our way through the Red Light District, which is actually amazing to see as it is straight up legal prostitution, so watching girls legitimately trying to advertise themselves is pretty hilarious. What you don’t realize is that many of the people in the district are actually there to find a love for 15 minutes( 50 Euro for a basic, prices increase with additional bells and whistles. Average number of clients in a night is roughly 20). We really noticed this when we were walking through fairly later at night and we noticed that out of the 400 or so people in the alley Lauren Day was the only girl All of the girls are independent entrepreneurs who rent out the windows for various amounts depending on location and time of day. They have a union and don’t answer to a strong pimp hand. It was funny to see guys bargaining with girls to get a better price and we even saw a dad taking his son around for what I assume was a 15^th birthday present. There was all shapes and sizes of women and men who dressed like women in one area we stumbled into. What is pretty interesting I thought was that there was a gigantic church right in the middle of the Red Light District, you would imagine the purpose of this church was to try and help the prostitutes and visitors to find salvation and stay away from all the sinning going on in Amsterdam. Nope, this church sold indulgences to patrons of the local area and therefore was extremely well funded and quite beautiful. Pat wanted to try his hand at bargaining with one of these ladies of the night but said, “ I know I would get a really good deal and I would feel bad when it was time to walk away.”

The next day we took a 4 hour walking tour of Amsterdam which is seriously one of the most beautiful and interesting cities in the world. The central palace, which is supposed to be extremely beautiful was under construction and covered in scaffolding. I am beginning to this that nothing is ever complete in Europe or nothing is as pretty as they say it is, so they cover it up to save face. Lauren Day loved the urban planning of the city and continued to take numerous pictures of streets, green places, and the canals of boaters. The houses are taxed based on width, so naturally everyone has extremely narrow houses. This means that they have ridiculously steep and narrow stairs, knowing this Lauren Day decided to read a map while walking up the stairs and fell on her face- she is clearly intelligent. Also, all of the houses have hooks that the top of them so you may hoist items to which ever floor you need to get them to, instead of shoving them through your narrow stairways. To solve the problem of having the load smashing into your windows if it go to close, all of the houses are built leaning forward as to save the windows. It was until several decades later that people decided that maybe they should just place the hook a little farther out and save themselves from the difficult task of building a forward leaning house. In addition the houses are all built on a swamp land so many of them are leaning in odd directions as certain parts sank over time. In addition to the beautiful houses there are a number of canals which run through the city where you find a bunch of boats running through full of happy tourists and locals. What also adds to the feel of Amsterdam are their streets. You are never really sure if you are on a road or a sidewalk because there are so few cars in many of the areas because EVERYONE rides a bike. It looks like an add for cutting down on your carbon footprint; you find people in suits, women in dresses, and bums alike all riding these old as hell looking bikes in huge streams in the same way you see people driving cars in the US. Fun fact: there are 400,000 residents of Amsterdam, 300,000 tourists give or take and 1,000,000 bikes at any given time. There is no trouble finding a bike. I brings you back to Bloomington having to dodge bikers going from place to place. The difference is that the bikers in Amsterdam aren’t the self righteous pricks from Bloomington who think they have right of way under every possible circumstance and are more than willing to run of your foot, Amsterdam bikers are extremely nice and ring their little bells to get you out of the way and they politely say excuse me! In addition there are trams and mopeds constantly going up and down the streets and somehow everyone manages to not get hit. It looks incredibly dangerous, but somehow everyone is safe.

After the walking tour we met up some friends from Lisbon and went to a bar where a pub crawl was suppose to begin. On the way we picked up some more Kebobs and Pat again spilled a large portion of the kebab on his shirt which he had spilled on previously. The crawl was suppose to last 6 clubs we made it to three. At one of the bars I was talking to a local whose drink was getting low and I offered to refill it and asked what it was. “Gnagerghashl” she said, obviously I was confused, I asked her to repeat, “Hambgrashel”. I quickly turned to the bartender and asked for two of whatever she was having, it was wine, yes I bought wine at a bar. Language barriers are cruel. It was another fun night of us showing up the other dancers. Pat and I got some food on the way home from a fastfood place called Feedo. This place takes the grossness of fast food to the next level. The do not take your order, you simply walk up to a wall of little plastic boxes, put in a couple euro, pull down the door and pull out your sandwich which may have been sitting in this greasy vending machine for anywhere between 2 minutes to 48 hours, yum.

The next day we set out to go to the Ann Frank museum and Vincent Van Gough museums. The Ann Frank museum was incredible. We literally went into the house where her and her family hid out during the Nazis occupation of Amsterdam. We then went to the Van Gough museum which was also interesting though expensive. We saw a number of cool self portraits, a few famous works and we learned a lot about Vinny. It was a little disappointing for Lauren and Avril as their favorite Van Gogh piece, the Bedroom, was being restored. Looks like yet another thing here is not yet finished. Being a artist he of course hated his parents and being a genius he of course hated everything he had to do in art school. Of course, even though he is now incredibly world renown, his works sells for millions of dollars and they were selling cardboard boxes in the gift shop with his work on it for 30 bucks, he considered himself a failure and shot himself in the chest. After the museum we had worked up quite a hunger and went to a burger joint a guy on our train from Barcelona to Paris recommended, BurgerMeester. Literally the best burger many of us had had. Check out the picks it was ridiculous. My cheese had truffles in it, enough said. We then went back to the hostel and since we had an early train in the morning we decided to just head to a coffee shop and chill out for a bit. We took our friends through the red light district again and got ourselves some more Kabobs. What do you think happened next? Yes, Pat spilled approximately a Kilroys shot glass worth of sauce and greasy meat on his Bib. This was the shirt he was wearing out every night. This is exactly according to plan however as his original plan was to look like a bum in order to deter pick pocketers, mission accomplished.

We crashed in our 18 person hostel room, which contained only sweaty naked fat men whom smelled like sweaty boat shoes in the worst way possible. These stinkers would attempt to negate their smelliness with body sprays adding to the stench of our courters. Needless to say we let Lauren Day, the only girl, sleep in the bed hidden around the corner.

After a bit of debate we have decided to cut out Prague and Copenhagen in favor of allowing us to chill in places for longer periods of time, and we are now able to add the Greek Island of Santorini to our schedule upon multiple recommendations. So now we are heading to Munich and Lauren is looking forward to finding some good Bratwurst.(German Sausage)