Amsterdam

Saturday, March 27 – Drove all day (over 8 hours) from Paris to Amsterdam. Once we arrived, we walked into more of the center part of the city (our hotel was in some sketchy outskirts). We walked through Vondelpark – a big park in the city, it had these huge mansion-like houses lining it on the other side of the trees - it was beautiful, even at night. We found a Thai restaurant (apparently Amsterdam is known for their Thai and Indian food); I had chicken spring rolls, chicken with spicy coconut milk curry sauce, and jasmine white rice – very good! We walked back to the main square where this guy was playing his guitar and singing; he was really good, so we sat and listen to him for a while. While we were there, I noticed this big gray thing in the middle of the square…it was a public urinal! No doors or sinks, just a big circular piece of plastic with little inlets so guys can go to the bathroom whenever they feel like. It was SO weird! Little did I know this was just the beginning of the sites we would see in this strange city…

Sunday, March 28 – Went to the Van Gogh Museum. I really enjoyed it, mostly because it was finally a museum that was not filled with Biblical painting or painting of royalty. It was really fun to see because it was all original painting, so you could see the brush strokes and the clumps of paint. The Almond Blossom Tree was my favorite painting – I loved it!! Then we headed to Anne Frank House. It was beautiful walking along the canals seeing all of the boats and bikes everywhere! We didn’t end up going into the Anne Frank House because the line was really long. So we went and decided to try some Amsterdam beer instead :) We walked through the flea market, then met up with some friends and walked through the Red Light District. Granted it was in the middle of the day, so it wasn’t really busy, but there were definitely women in their windows. It was interesting because we had an entire class discussion (2 ½ hours) about Amsterdam and the Red Light District: watching vs. being watched, if they women “hunt down” the men or the men find the women, and the proper etiquette for “buying” the women. After that experience we went to eat at an Indonesian restaurant.

After dinner we walked around for a while until it got dark and went back to the Red Light District - it was different at night. It’s so weird, they just sit/stand there waiting for men or knocking on the windows to get their attention. There were all kinds of women there, big, small, young, old, dressed “normal” and some more risqué. The other very shocking thing was the people who were walking in the area: men, women, elderly men, couples, police, we even saw some children! So strange.   
 

I decided that Amsterdam is one of the weirdest cities in the world! It has some of the most ethnically diverse food/restaurants (everything from Chinese and Indian food to hamburgers and sauerkraut). Smoking pot (or “dope” as my mother loves to refer to it as) is kind of encouraged. They had advertisements on the bus, like “did you know” posters about interesting facts and benefits of it. The strangest thing though is the juxtapositions it has. You’ll be walking down the street and see a souvenir shop with a pretty postcard of windmills and fields of tulips next to a peep show building next to a coffee shop where everyone is smoking next to a cute little canal next to a torture museum next to the Red Light District next to a street full of neon signs for Lebanese food, Chinese food, etc. next to a sex museum next to a shop selling wooden shoes next to another coffee shop…SOOOOOO weird!

Bike Ramp and parking lot

Amsterdam is really cute during the day with cute cobblestone roads, canals, and bikes galore (even huge parking ramps full of bikes), but at night it is much different. Everyone is smoking and all of the little shops that are cute during the day have big neon signs lit up. All of the people were so nice; they went out of their way to help us. They were all so happy too, I saw more than one person biking along the street by themselves with just a little smirk on their face. I wish we could have seen some of the country side and the windmills, but I still enjoyed it!