Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Before I start, I just have to make it very clear to the universe that I REFUSE to get sick right now, despite the fact that everyone around me seems to be sick. Take that, bitch.

So much for getting this whole trip business blogged about before getting back to having a life and having new things to write about. But I WILL get it done before I start forgetting everything that we did on the trip. And I'll wait to resume my first week back to reality.

As i started out the last blog being amazed at how easy it is to travel here, I would also like to mention how amazing it is that all of our travel went without a hitch. We had multiple flights on EasyJet, which is a low cost airline in Europe that several people I know have had problems with, but nothing ever went wrong with any of our flights, which kind of amazes me (*knock on wood*).

The hostel experience was also more or less positive, except for our first night in Amsterdam. In looking at different hostels online, there were a lot that got pretty bad ratings, but most of the ones that didn't seem completely trashy were pretty expensive, especially because we were there for the weekend. So I had booked one that was supposed to be really nice and was relatively new. Now, according to the website, they were a little bit out of the way, but only about 10 minutes from Central Station on a bus. Well, first we got on the bus going in the wrong direction, and had to ride it all the way back and then in the right direction, but it was still almost 20 minutes from Central Station (and this is in the evening with very little traffic). And then it was a little bit of a walk through a really dead neighborhood from the bus stop, so we decided to check in and stay the night there but try to find another hostel for the other two nights. This happened pretty easily and without a huge cost difference, so we happily found our room and threw down our bags and checked out the place we were staying, which, if it weren't so far away from everything there is to do in Amsterdam, was quite a place. It was basically like staying in a relatively nice hotel except that you had to share a room with other people. Which we actually didn't have to do because the place is equipped to hold a TON of people and there weren't very many there, so Katie and I had a room to ourselves, which was nice. We had some dinner at the restaurant of the hostel (decent, but nothing special) and then pretty quickly crashed out. The next morning we ate breakfast, donned our backpacks, and headed to the other hostel, which Katie had stayed in before. MUCH better, and within walking distance of museumplein and leidseplein, which are basically the main areas of town...museumplein being where all the (shocker) museums are, and leidseplein being a lot of little shops and restaurants.

We couldn't actually get into our room until 2, so we put our bags in a locker and checked out leidseplein: H&M #2 was less exciting than the one in Edinburgh, but not bad at all, and there were a bunch of other fun shops, especially places to buy fun colorful shoes, which was exciting, but it was all also very expensive and I was running out of room in my bag already, so I dutifully abstained from buying anything. After putting out bags in our room, we decided to get the museums out of the way. We went to the Rijksmuseum, which was not terribly exciting, but there were some really nice paintings. On our way from there to the Van Gogh museum, we found an ice skating rink, that most people were just playing around on in their shoes, so we did that for a little while, and then saw these people jumping around on what looked like a slab of concrete, except that there were noises coming from it. Upon closer inspection, we found 9 squares of metal which, when you stepped on them, made a sort of bell noise. Needless to say this offered tons of enjoyment to us for like 10 minutes until we decided to let the little kids all around us have a turn and went in search of more art.

I would just like to say that I LOVE the Van Gogh museum. Until recently, I really wasn't all that big of a Van Gogh, but my best friend's passion for him has led me to see more and more of his paintings and realize how amazing he really is. And the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam made that even more real. It was interesting to see the evolution of his work (the museum is organized in chronological order) and all of the different movements and people who influenced him. And, because he was pretty tight with Gaugin, there were also several Gaugin paintings, and he is another paiter that I am starting to appreciate more and more. AND there was a portrait of Van Gogh painted by none other than my favorite painter ever, Toulouse-Lautrec, which made me SO happy, even though it wasn't a particularly spectacular painting.

After a nice afternoon dose of culture, we headed in search of dinner at a pancake restaurant that Katie had gone to the last time she was in Amsterdam, where we split a dinner pancake, which was basically a giant crepe with spinach, french cheese (pretty sure it was brie), and cashews, which was quite delicious. Then we had poffertjes, which are a dutch desert...little balls of dough served with syrup or sugar or some other sweet thing. In my case, ice cream. After eating, we were on our way to meet up with some girls who are from Oregon and also studying in Lyon, and just happened to be in Amserdam at the same time. On the way, we got caught up in this major giggle fest to the point that we couldn't even walk. It started with Katie saying: "You know what would suck? To be a penguin." And there we were, standing on a sidewalk in Amsterdam laughing like crazy and this couple walks by and the man shakes his head and says "Weed," which made us laugh even more because we were not high at all. It was good times.

So then we made our way to meet up with the girls at their hostel smack dab in the middle of the Red Light district. We wandered around with them for a while, and ended up at the Bulldog, which is a pretty well known bar, and we danced and made fun of two groups of really drunk women. One being a small group of women in their mid/late 30s probably who were dressed like skanky 18 year olds, and the other was a bigger group of VERY drunk women wearing matching hand-painted shirts with tacky nicknames like "Blow Jo" and "Emma Rhoids" who turned out to be a bachelorette party from England who had been drinking since 11 that morning. They were quite amusing and we even got a picture with them. I wasn't much for hanging out in the bar because I'm not a huge fan of bad electronica (when we first got there they were playing reggaeton and decent hip-hop, but it quickly switched to "dance" music...ugh) or being inundated by cigarette smoke, so I dragged Katie across the street to Boom Chicago, which is an improv comedy club. Much more my style. We stayed there til about 2am being highly amused, and then headed back to the hostel and happily settled into bed.

Saturday was pretty busy. We started off the morning buying exotic fruit (a dragon fruit and a passion fruit, neither of which I had ever actually seen before), and eating it while sitting on the side of one of the canals until a gust of wind blew it all into the canal. Oops. It was good stuff, though. Then we went to a gallery called Foam, which was a photo gallery with two really interesting shows. One was a series of photos displaying the "unseen" aspects of America. Some of the photos included a nuclear waste storage tank, a highly deformed white tiger (all white tigers are the product of selective inbreeding, which leads to deformities), a military training town, and brown bears in hibernation. There were a bunch more and it was a really interesting exhibition. The other exhibit was this photographer from the 30s who was a photo journalist who mostly photographed murder victims and other "hot topic" sort of subjects. Some of the images were really difficult, but it was an impressive series of photographs. I *heart* photography so much. From there, we went to the Anne Frank museum, which I went through by myself because Katie had already done it. I don't really know what to say about it. It was intense and interesting to see the place that I've heard described SO many times and see the place where she was writing her diary, which I've read a couple of times. And it was hard, but I kind of feel like I've read/heard the stories so many times that it almost doesn't really impact me as much as I expected it to. But I'm definitely glad I went.

I met up with Katie at a bagel shop right next to the museum, and I walked in to the seemingly calm café while reading a text Katie had sent me while I was in the museum, which said, "You are never allowed to try shrooms!" Apparently barely 10 minutes before I got there, a guy who was there with a bunch of friends started having a seizure and was throwing up and it was really intense...and the only reason they could come up with was that he and all his friends had just been doing shrooms. So that had Katie totally wigged out. It was strange to hear the story and know it had just happened, but look around the café and find no trace of it. Anyway, we got out of there pretty quickly and headed to meet up with our friends again (because I'm really dumb and had left my camera at the Bulldog and thankfully they picked it up for me) and then went to Madame Tussaud's and took pictures with celebrities. We finished off the day with a canal boat tour, which was disappointingly uninteresting. So much so that Katie fell asleep for part of it. We had italian for dinner and then went back to the hostel, where we were thinking about passing out, until I got a text from the other girls seeing if we wanted to meet up with them, which we did for a while, and ended up hanging out with them at a coffee shop watching Pulp Fiction with no sound and dutch subtitles. Which was really weird. And meanwhile I wrote postcards, which everyone was all surprised by, and which I proceeded to put in the mail with incomplete addresses. Which was SO dumb.

On Sunday morning, we whizzed through an Art Nouveau expo at the Hermitage museum, which was full of beautiful art. We were a bit short on time, because we had a flight to catch that afternoon, but we were trying to get the most out of these tourist discount cards we had bought (I AMsterdam card. Totally worth it if you are prepared to museum/tourist it up). Then we bought muffins and made our way to the airport.

And that was Amsterdam. Not the drug/partying spree that most people my age have there. And it wasn't quite as stunning as I had heard (then again, might have something to do with the fact that it was January and therefore the weather was not entirely favorable to gorgeousness...and maybe the lack of pot-induced awe had something to do with my differing opinion as well). That's not to say that it wasn't a really interesting and beautiful city. It just wasn't what I was expecting. But I had a really good time and wouldn't mind going back. Maybe when the weather is better and it is more pleasant to rent a bike and just tour around the city. And to try to find more fun galleries and museums because I bet there could be some really interesting stuff there if you look for it.

Wow, that was long. Thanks for bearing with me if you made it to the end!

Biz.