So here it is: my last weekend travel update. It’s sad, but I need to get used to doing a lot of “lasts” in the next few weeks.
This weekend was Amsterdam. I had no idea what to expect, and didn’t do any research on the city, but everyone told me I would absolutely love it. I did. It was disappointing to spend only 48 hours there. I did a lot of wandering, which was great but also very cold. I don’t know how to describe Amsterdam other than “cute”. It was adorable. There were Christmas lights on almost every street. (They just turned them on in Florence too!) I even thought it was cute when two boys were pouring water on passersbys just because they were doing it out of window in an old Dutch building in front of a canal. There were shops in every window – books, clothes, cool house gadgets, etc. – and each was cuter than the next. What I saw of the city reminded me of places like Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and P-Town. It may have been because of the water and the tourists (there were more than in Florence), but I think it had more to do with the trendy shops everywhere. I just did a lot of window-shopping in the neighborhoods with the cute stores. Everything, including food, was really expensive.
The architecture was fantastic too. Most of the buildings are tilted and crooked. I’m assuming the foundations just weren’t supportive enough to keep them straight. The effect is awesome. Some buildings were built with strange angles for corners and mess with your mind’s sense of perspective. Other buildings are so titled that the windows are on a diagonal. As my friend Ben said, “You can see why the cubists liked it so much.” I loved the windows on all the buildings – huge and open. They weren’t like Florence’s windows that are always shuttered and closed. I could even look in a few of the second story windows to see apartments, offices, and dinner parties.
The thing that surprised me the most about Amsterdam was the “seediness.” I expected it to be dirty and trashy. And it was dirty and trashy, but in a cutsie way. We were intrigued by the red light district and walked through it a bunch of times. Even though the prostitutes were disturbing and sad, they weren’t dirty hookers standing on the street. They each had their own little cubicle and turned men away that they didn’t like. With all the neon lights and British and American tourists, a lot of areas of Amsterdam felt like a movie set at night. It was seedy in a non-dangerous way, like P-Town or LasVegas. (I’m comparing Amsterdam to cities I’ve visited in the US, but it’s really much different from anywhere I’ve been before.)
We kept a little diary to remember everything we did, but after the length of last weekend’s post, I won’t go into every detail. We spent a lot of time just hanging out, trying to stay out of the cold. We forgot to research what traditional Dutch food was (oops!) so I ended up eating a lot of fast-food, like Subway-style stirfry and a falafel. We did sit down for pancakes once. They were as good as we expected them to be. I got Poffertjes, which are quarter-sized pancakes, and they were covered in walnut ice cream and whipped cream.
On Friday afternoon we went to the Van Gogh museum, which was awesome. There’s a field surrounded by museums, the Museumplein, that reminded me a lot of the National Mall and got me a little excited to go home to DC. The museum was great. The people in charge must know how many people want to get close to the actual paint – there were rope barriers and glass frames on every painting. On Saturday we went to the Anne Frank house. I only read excerpts from the book and I remember parts of the movie from when I was younger, but seeing where she lived made me want to read the her diary. The most moving room was her bedroom, where they still have all the clippings from magazines that she used to try to decorate her walls. They had her actual diary on display too, which was really cool.
This was the first time I’ve traveled with more than two other people and it was definitely a lesson in compromise. There were a lot of people I wanted to meet up with and hang out in Amsterdam, but after a few hours I realized it wouldn’t be possible to see everyone. We actually ran into Ben and Cameron (from Rome) twice, which made it a lot easier to hang out with them. I tried really hard to meet up with Jess’s (from AU) friend that she met in Madrid. After a day of phone calls trying to meet up, we finally both decided we could meet at a bar – only to find out that it was a chain and there were four or five in Amsterdam. It didn’t help that all the street names were un-pronounceable either. Dutch is a very funny language.
All in all, Amsterdam was added to my “Cities I’ve Been To But Need To Go Back To” List. I don’t think I got everything out of Amsterdam that there was to get. I didn’t do any research before I left, so I didn’t know which neighborhoods I wanted to go to or what things I wanted to see. I’m glad I didn’t have expectations though, because it was difficult to do everything that everyone in the group wanted to do. I also stayed in a hostel downtown, so I didn’t venture into the outskirts much. I’ve heard from a lot of people that the cities surrounding Amsterdam are the same thing, just less touristy. So, I guess I’ll just have to stay longer next time! (Jess & I are already semi-planning a trip for next May. We’ll just need to see what funds are available at the time!)
