sarah abroadfoot: June 2010

It's half-term again folks. These brits just can't work for more than 6 weeks it seems before needing a break. I understand though, because after the last 6 weeks of teaching, I was more than in need of a vacation. What better then to pack up a backpack and head to Amsterdam, Holland for 2 nights?

Culture in Amsterdam is definitely one to experience at least once. Everything taboo is right there in the open, and everyone's completely chill about it. In fact, it's just the norm.

This tale really does begin on Sunday night at a friend's birthday party. It was promised to be a messy night with drinks and karaoke. All things said, that sunday night definitely lived up to its expectations. For instance, I don't actually remember leaving to go home. I remember being there. I remember SOME of the end of the night...however I don't remember going up the stairs to leave. I don't remember leaving through the door. I remember being outside catching the cab home. I remember getting home. The rest - a wee bit hazy. So a good night. The pictures that surfaced in the following days say it all, to put it lightly.

So the plane took off at 3pm Monday - thought that'd be enough time to sober up and put the pieces of myself back in place. However - Monday's trek to the airport and then the subsequent hour spent there in search of food and coffee proved rather interesting. At least we made it on the plane! Both my flatmate who I was traveling with and myself were in rather rough shape at the airport, but a little bit of garbage intake from Burger King and Coke/Fanta put us right and we were off.

Landing in Amsterdam and trying to find the train into the city was our first Dutch challenge. We managed. The train dropped us off at Amsterdam Centraal train station, and then the real challenge began. First of all - the train station has two exits.....we obviously took the wrong one out and were confronted with scenery that I hadn't seen on the google maps pre-research view I had before....so that was a fun 5 minutes of "ummmm....so......WOW those are a lot of bicycles!.....where are we....and where do we go from here?"

Finally setting off in the right direction, we made our way towards the Flying Pig Downtown Hostel - and only really took about two wrong turns. This becomes amusing later on in the tale. Just trust me. SO, after all that, we checked in, dropped our bags, picked up what was going to be necessary, and set off to wander and see the city. Found some coffeeshops, had some coffee, and were back out on our way. Wandering in what seemed to be a direction that was away from our hostel, we ended up back on our street.....3 times.....it blew my mind. It always seemed like we were heading well away from where we were staying, but we always managed to get back to the starting place without even realizing we had turned off the path we were taking. Crazy Amsterdam streets all leading back to the same place. This was, we decided, going to be very handy in the end, because it meant that we could go and live it up a bit and be just fine making our way home. That assumption was mostly correct, though we did have the amusing thought that once we started to actually look for our hostel, we'd never actually find it again. Especially after becoming mildly impaired. It only took a wee bit of extra work.

The hostel itself was INCREDIBLE. There was a bar with VERY cheap drinks on the main level right when you go in with a comfy lounge room toward the back, pool tables, and chess boards. Very cool place. We almost had to force ourselves to leave it!

Tuesday was a later start to the day than we had anticipated. But we did dive right in to the nightlife the night before. That said, we weren't in too rough shape Tuesday morning. So we set off to visit some museums and some more coffeeshops, and a few pubs and places to eat as well. We managed to get to Anne Frank's house. That puts things into perspective. It was a really well put together museum, and the fact that they had preserved her room and the wall where she hung various pictures of famous people to make it seem less dreary....it was a little surreal, but in a good way. We also managed to visit the sex museum, vodka museum, and marijuana and hash museum. (See? Everything taboo is just right out there in the open in Amsterdam.) Also, the red-light district - that was just a strange space to be in. You're walking along BEAUTIFUL canals with amazing buildings, and in the windows there are women in very skimpy undies dancing, or even just standing there staring out at you. Different culture for sure.

We actually managed to find a rather cool pub in the red-light district though. There was a coffeeshop underneath, and upstairs/main floor there was a pub (with Guinness on tap, so I was a happy camper) with pool. So we wandered in there, had a few pints, and played some pool. It was fairly empty, so it was nice. No crowds. Actually, there were no real crowded areas anywhere in Amsterdam like we're used to living near Camden in London. Definitely a nice break from all that.

Anyways, Tuesday night, we found dinner (amazingly, because by the time we realized we were hungry, it was rather late and finding non-fast food was proving to be a challenge), then headed back to the hostel to have some drinks, meet a few travelers, and most importantly, play some more pool.

Wednesday wasn't much to write home about though - got up stupid-early, grabbed the train back to Schiphol Airport, and made our way back to the big smoke. All things said and done - t'was definitely a good trip!

And now for a few photographs....!