A Dam Good Time, Part 1

The first thought that came to my mind when I got off the train and saw Amsterdam was: I am so moving here. After a day of sitting on a train, our group arrived in Centraal Station after dark. On the walk to our hostel, we were already taking in some of Amsterdam’s iconic sights: the many canals, the unique architecture, and bicycles everywhere! Towards the end of the trip I stopped gawking, but in the beginning you would have thought I had never seen a bike before in my life. Supposedly there are 600,000 bikes in the city of Amsterdam, and anywhere someone could possibly chain one up, there were at least half a dozen.

Our hostel was a total dump, but with a name like ‘Amigo Hotel’ we should have known. One might have thought the guy running the place would have been Hispanic, but he was instead a creepy, overly forward Egyptian. Roark and I were ‘given’ the two beds that were not with the group. When we checked out our room, we promptly grabbed our blankets and headed up to the room with everyone else to sleep on the floor--it was that bad. Rotten Indian food barely begins to describe the smell, and the other four people in the room were snoring like it was a competition. I am surprised that they didn’t knock the shutters off, shake the foundations of the building, or at least wake each other up. Still, the floor wasn’t too terrible for the one night we slept on it.


The city itself was great, no complaints there. The Dutch are extremely friendly people, and it seemed like everybody spoke English, which was nice. The city is a bustling metropolis, but it manages to maintain the atmosphere of a quaint little town. We took a great boat tour of the city's many canals, which was a great time. The views from the water gave us an interesting perspective of the city, and there was some interesting tidbits in the audio portion of the tour. For instance all the houses and shops have a hook built in to the top of the building that is part of a pulley system used to haul furniture and goods into the upper floors. It was developed because most buildings have extremely steep staircases, since the building plots are so narrow. These pulley systems are in use even today.


We visited a few museums, some better than others. The Heineken Experience was a total waste of money. We put up with a warehouse full of Heineken propaganda but were only compensated with 1-½ beers for our whopping 15-euro entry price. The Rembrandt house was disappointing since it contained little of his work, but standing in the spot where he painted most of his masterpieces was quite an inspiration. We also saw the Anne Frank house, which was very touching. We got to walk through the crawl space behind the bookshelf where the two families hid from the Nazis. It was unfurnished as a request by Anne’s father after the war, but the atmosphere was still very palpable, and somewhat haunting.


After visiting a few coffee shops there could not have been a better time to visit the Van Gogh Museum. The collection contained over 200 of his paintings all in chronological order on the wall. Unfortunately, I was rushed through the latter half of his work in the name of making it to the Heineken Experience before it closed. But, I am not too bummed out: as the title of this blog implies, there will definitely be a Part 2.