Amsterdam

I arrived in Amsterdam one day before Steph arrived because her flight was to land at 7 am and she wanted me to meet her at the airport. I stayed at a hostel called the Flying Pig Uptown. The staff seemed rather unprofessional and lax, but my roommates were great! There were five girls from Toronto, an Aussie named Matt and a girl from Ohio. Around dinner time, Matt and I were the only ones who hadn't eaten so we went for dinner. Matt and I got along well because we were traveling for the same reasons: to see things, not try all the drugs in Amsterdam. That night, we chilled out in the hostel with the other Canadian girls while they tried out the legal pot. We played cards with them after, they were funny! I was up early to meet Steph the next morning. Her and I booked a hotel room for the next two nights, so I checked out of the hostel and locked up Steph's and my luggage; we couldn't check into the hotel for a few hours. To kill time, Steph and I went to the Van Gogh museum. One of my favourite pieces I saw was the Wheatfield with a Reaper.
We wandered around a bit more and browsed around the Rijksmuseum and its garden.







After a siesta, we went out for an authentic dinner with bitterballen. We walked around downtown for a bit then hung out at the hotel to catch up over a few drinks. I bought a bottle of wine, but had no cork screw, so I used a butter knife to jam in the cork. Classy. The hotel staff was rather rude at the Quentin. The funny thing about our room was that Steph and I were to share a queen sized bed, with a picture hanging over it of lesbians!

Outside our hotel is a nice fountain. About the nicest thing at that place.
The next day, we headed straight for the Heineken museum. We had fun there!










(Making friends with the bar tenders = extra free beers!!!)



When we were ready to leave the Heineken museum, it was raining, so Steph bought an authentic Heineken umbrella. That thing was huge and we had to lug it around for the rest of the trip! We took a canal boat to the Anne Frank house from there.

This building was quieter than the Sistine Chapel, the air was thick and heavy. I didn't take any photos inside, because it is essentially empty rooms filled with tourists. Besides, an image cannot capture what it was like to walk where the two families lived in fear for so long before the devastating end. The outside really just looks like any other building.

Beside the Anne Frank house is Westerkerk, or West Church.
We headed further into the downtown core. It surprised me how timid a resident of downtown Toronto is of crossing streets in Europe! I decided to take just one photo when Steph was too timid to cross a street, after I crossed with a mob of people just before the light changed.
We reached the Dam square which is in the heart of downtown Amsterdam. We could see the Mark Raven Museum,
the pillar in the centre,
and the Dam Square Paleis, or Palace.


After a light dinner, we decided to check out a "coffee shop" and see what the world of legal marijuana looks like. We went to the Grasshopper, which also has a bar and a steakhouse!

Everyone in the shop was pretty much as expected: high and lazy. Actually, come to think of it, everyone in the city was pretty lazy. Probably because there is so much pot in the air. I took a video of the shop so you can get a good idea, but again, the lack of Internet signal I was stealing before makes uploading multimedia difficult. Steph and I never got to the heart of the red light district, but danced around its outskirts. I guess neither of us had any interest in looking at the prostitutes in the core of the red light district, which is also legal in Amsterdam.

The maintenance of the city really reflects the population who choose to inhabit it. After talking to other visitors in the city, people either love or hate Amsterdam. You can probably figure out which kind of personality belongs to each group, and you can probably guess how much I enjoyed Amsterdam.

We flew out the next morning very early. 6:50 am early. Beware of the Amsterdam airport security, it blows. We stood, not in line, but in a mob of people for over an hour before we even got within sight of security. I felt like I was at a concert with a bunch of teeny boppers the way people were pushing. To add to our delay, security asks to search Steph's purse. Steph was pretty outraged at the delay and didn't notice why security wanted to rummage through her purse. I saw out of the corner of my eye an item they removed from it: the knife I had used for the wine was in her purse! We ran to our gate to find we are the second last group the flight was waiting for. I told Steph why they took her purse, and she was shocked she had forgotten about it in there. She opened her purse on the plane, and lo and behold, there is the butter knife. They let her take a knife on the plane. Talk about added delay for nothing! But we made it, and we headed off to Berlin...