Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting: Amsterdam.

     
I am such a huge fan of this city’s look and feel. Every other street has a canal on it, and the buildings are all skinny and tall, and completely mismatched. You usually have to walk up several floors of a winding staircase to get anywhere in any of them.

People are also crazy into biking. I mean crazy:

There are bike lanes everywhere, and bike-specific traffic lights.You can also rent a bike for cheap. Locals usually own several bikes, as well. The reason for all of this is quite clear immediately – the whole city only spans several blocks. You can comfortably walk from the furthest canal to central station in about 30 minutes, so with a bike you’re always at most 10 minutes away from anywhere else in the city. In fact, now that I think about it, the streets aren’t all really designed to accommodate car traffic, but that doesn’t really seem to bother anybody.

It’s also quite a relief to be somewhere (relatively) affordable, for once. London, Dublin, Paris… then losing my camera! My wallet was starting to cry for help.

So, how’s Amsterdam? This place is basically a giant tourist trap. Everyone speaks an almost fluent English, and there are hardly any locals around. The few I found said they actually live (or were born) outside of Amsterdam (--which made me realize: in my whole life, and all of my travels, I’ve never met anyone who said they were ‘from Amsterdam’. Have you?)

This revelation makes their slogan incredibly awkward:
This is Amsterdam’s response to ‘I (heart) NY’. This might be a veiled reference to the fact that most of the population consists of tourists or foreigners.

Speaking of ‘English’, I wanted to mention how amazing the universality of the English language is. This trip has made me realize how so very lucky I am to be born in a country whose first language is English (well, mostly). The fact that everyone here speaks English makes it feel like everybody’s catering to me. More interestingly, however is that English is every foreigner’s language of choice, too. Everybody I’ve met, be they French or Israeli, uses English to get around in a country where Dutch is the official national language. I’ve found myself in many awkward circles with a German and a pair of kids from El Salvador, all speaking in broken travel English, in Holland. It’s so easy to take it for granted when you’re in Canada, but out here it makes me feel very lucky.

Here are pictures of the famous sights:

Dam Square:

And right across from it, the Royal Palace:
Yea, I totally came during the right time of the year, eh?

The Red Light district:

And while we’re discussing that, here are a bunch of swans and ducks chilling in a canal on the district:
I’ve actually met quite a few swans in my travels. I really don’t know why they keep following me…

Amsterdam is peppered with what they call ‘coffee shops’. In my naiveness, I didn’t pick up right away why they weren’t calling them cafés, but I learned quickly. There is basically no equivalent to this kind of store in Montreal, or, well, in much of the rest of the world, for that matter. You step in and are presented with a menu which lists any and every breed or type of drug, priced by gram. From my experience, these stores are never run by locals,  and nobody let’s you take a picture of them… or of, well, many of things in them.

However, like in much of the rest of the world, you’re not allowed to smoke in bars, tobacco or otherwise. You are often provided with a smoking room, though.

Now because of these coffee shops, many of Amsterdam’s streets smell, which is incredibly unfortunate for the image of Amsterdam I tried to describe in the opening paragraphs of this post. Just walking through the streets is such a pleasure, and getting a sniff of drugs often spoils the ambience, in my opinion.

Speaking of streets, what the hell is up with their crazy naming scheme? Everything from the restaurant menus to the tram system  are designed to cater to (American) tourists, but none of the streets have a name that’s even pronounceable by an uninitiated Anglophone. Just pick a spot at random on googlemaps to see what I’m talking about.

Oddly, for all the partying the tourists do, this city more or less shuts down at 1 o’clock. Surely, the red light district stays open for business, but I’m not really into that, I guess, so I had nothing better to do but walk home.

What was the coolest thing I did while in Amsterdam? Attended a Passover Seder:
(Obviously I’m not allowed to take pictures inside…) The more people I mention this too, though, the less awesome it sounds – people keep bringing up friends who went to seders in more exotic parts of the world (Nepal, the Philippines…) so, yea…

I also went to the Van Gogh museum. Just as I went to see the London Eye on its anniversary, I was lucky enough to visit Gogh on his birthday! There were no celebrations and nobody else seemed to have noticed. (Pictures are not allowed in that museum.)

I also visited Rembrant’s house.

Time for Amsterdisms!
(or Dutchims..? That’s not as funny…)

-Coin operated food!
 

-The tram/bus system is really weird. For starters, it almost operates on the honours system – if you dont swipe, the driver will likely not say anything. In many cases, nobody’s actually monitoring you to see if you do swipe your card. Besides that, they have a few ticketing systems – the first, for 2.50 Euro a ride, you get to travel for free for an hour. They also have a strip card, (which you can’t even buy in the subway system, only in book stores or grocery stores) which, for only 7.60 Euro, gives you 15 slots to punch in. But every ride costs you 2 slots… I have no idea what they were thinking when they came up with this system…

-Another outdoor bathroom! (I only saw one my whole stay there, on my way to the train station.)

-Tulips!

-In Holland in general, apparently, you have to pay for ketchup…? (or mayo, or any kind of sauce with your fries…)

Finally, on the topic I brought up a couple of posts ago discussing the difference between North America and Europe, I stumbled upon a funny and topical image on reddit the other day (Click to enlarge):
(By the way, you might not have noticed this, but the European ‘natural wonders’ listed are the Cliff of Moher that I visited in Galway on March 14th.)

As usual, I’m on a train while typing this – I’m on my way to Brussels for a day or so. I actually have no idea what to expect there, so I’m going to snap this laptop shut and read up on it in my trusty guidebook.

PS: I’m sorry that these are getting long; I had originally intended for each post to be bite-sized, but for that I’d need to post more often, and I’m often too tired or busy to do that when I’m not on a train. It looks like I find it easiest to post once per city, which is about every 4-6 days.