Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is expensive and full of tourists. So expensive that I continued my inadvertent vegetarianism that I'd picked up in Paris, and so full of tourists that I had to change hotels three times in the week I was there because nobody had room for me for more than a couple consecutive nights.
The first hostel was called Hotel Sphinx on the southern end of town, which was inconvenient because the train station was on the north end. But it was the only place that could take me and was under 50 euro (although only just). I stayed there one night before moving to Hotel Bulldog, which was run by a chain of *ahem* coffee shops. Despite that, it actually turned out to be quite well run, and the best hostel I stayed in of the three. It was clean, quiet (perhaps partially because everyone was so zoned out), and had lots of food (which also follows...), and a couple of nice comfy couches to watch movies (ditto). It was also located right in the heart of Amsterdam's famous red-light district, so I could watch college frat boys walk out of prostitutes' rooms and pop their collars while smirking to their friends, waiting to give them high fives. OK, so that only happened once, but it made an impression. Most of the time you could walk by the prostitutes without even noticing, as they were all down small side alleys. That is, except for the ones who had their offices on the backside of the old church. But if you did go down one of those back alleys, you would be greeted by women in white bikinis with blacklit rooms striking a pose or flirting with male passers-by. Either that or a closed curtain...
Anyhoo, the third hostel I stayed in was also in the red light district, called Hotel the Globe. It had a pub downstairs that was always full of rowdy British, Irish, or Italian football (soccer) fans watching the satellite TV, drinking beer and yelling at each other. The first night in my 8-person room was me, 6 girls, and one guy. But all of the girls left and the next day a group of six rowdy Italian guys moved in and would not ever leave (except at 1am to come back at 6am) or shut up. Sigh. But I did make friends with the cleaning guy who came from Ghana and told me about all of his family that he's supporting back home (three sisters, two brothers, and his mom).
Back on the food note, Amsterdam didn't seem to have a lot of its own "signature" dishes, but they did have a lot of immigrants, and therefore a lot of foreign food (especially Indonesian, for some reason). The unfortunate thing was that this food conformed to Amsterdam prices, which were really high. If I was too cheap to eat out in Paris where there were at least some budget options, there was no way I was going to pay 20 euro for an OK meal in Amsterdam. For under 10 or 15 euro in Paris you could get decent cheap street food and healthy alternatives (fruit, nuts, yoghurt), but the only food in that range in Amsterdam was junk food. We're talking candied apples, donuts, and ice cream. There were always also the french fry stands - actually they call them Flemish Fries as they were invented in Belgium (who knew?) - but grease and mashed potatoes can only keep you going for so long. So I was pretty excited when I discovered a couple of branches of the Maoz falafel chain I had so relied on in Barcelona. It wasn't quite as good as in Barcelona (no chickpeas or cauliflower and the falafel balls were smaller), but it was a meal for 5 euro that would fill me up. And when you need three meals a day and the euro's going for $1.50, after a while I couldn't really afford more than that.
So, yeah, besides eating and sleeping, I did actually do some touristing around in Amsterdam. The main touristy features were the canals that spread in concentric horshoes around the city center and the bicycles that everyone used as a mode of transport. Everywhere you turned there were picturesque canals with dinged up little boats cruising around as locals and tourists alike zipped by on bicycles (or left them stacked artistically on the street). That accompanied by the red brick buildings with the gabled roofs did make quite a romantic little picture. Except that it would not stop f-ing raining, which kind of put a damper (no pun intended) on my desire to take a casual stroll.
And, not being 100% museum-ed out, I did manage to convince myself to go to the Anne Frank House, the Van Gogh Museum, the Photography Museum, and the Rijksmuseum (housing a bunch of Dutch masterpieces). The secret attic of the Anne Frank house was much larger than I had imagined. For some reason I imagined throughout the book that they were all ducking to walk around; I don't know where I got that idea. But if I though reading her diary was pretty personal, it was nothing compared to walking through her room and seeing the posters and magazine clippings she'd pasted on the wall - not to mention her handwriting in the original journal itself. Seeing everyone's pictures and where they slept and ate and listened to the radio made the reality of their deaths that much more horrible.
While that sobering trip was definitely the most compelling of the things I saw in Amsterdam, the others were also worth a visit. The Van Gogh Museum was my second favorite. I especially liked learning about how he started so late and never really mastered all of the technical aspects of painting (he often still used a perspective frame to help him get his sketches right), but was still able to create things that had such an impact on people. It give my artistically challenged self hope, anyway. The painters in the Rijksmuseum were the exact opposite. Apparently the Dutch masters were all about smoothness, detail, and technical precision. Rembrandt's "The Night Watch" might have been exquisitely crafted and a breakthrough in portraying active portraits, but frankly it was boring. I liked Van Gogh better.
The photography museum (FOAM) was kind of like the one in Paris in that they both didn't really seem to have a permanent collection but were just spotlighting certain artists at the moment. The mixup of artists was kind of strange but I particularly liked a retrospective on the work of Jacques Henri Lortigue, a French guy who captured everyday life throughout the 20th century through action shots. His photos were fun, and didn't have some of the over-dramatization of the other artists.
And I almost forgot, there was also the "Heineken Experience," which was a Disneyland version of a brewery tour, even including one of those movies where the floor shakes around (to make you feel like you're a bottle going through the factory). But they give you enough beer that you couldn't actually drink it all without getting completely wasted at 3pm, so that's where my money went I suppose. I went with Chrstine, a Portuguese-Canadian girl just finishing up a couple of years in Ireland organizing skateboarding competitions, who I'd met in the Bulldog hostel and hung out with for a couple of days. That made downing glass after glass of beer at the plastic-feeling bar a little less awkward than it would have been had I gone alone.
Overall, I probably would only have stayed in Amsterdam 3 or 4 days, but I found out the Pride Parade was going to be be that weekend so I decided to stay longer. It was a long time to spend in one place on this kind of trip, and I was getting a bit sick of it in the end. I saw a lot of interesting stuff and met a few cool people, but in the end I got sick of stuff like the frat boy smirking out of the prostitutes' room an people assaulting me on the street corner telling me that I don't really know how to party if I don't come on their expensive all-night bar hopping, binge drinking tour. As a tourist, the place kind of felt like a kids' playground, not to sound like too much of a prude. It was fun for a couple of days, but beyond that a bit tiring. I have no conception what it would be like to live there; I imagine those are two completely different worlds. I realize now that whether I am well-fed or not also has a great deal to do with my mood, and in Amsterdam I wasn't particularly well-fed. So that might have something to do with it... Up to top
Amsterdam is expensive and full of tourists. So expensive that I continued my inadvertent vegetarianism that I'd picked up in Paris, and so full of tourists that I had to change hotels three times in the week I was there because nobody had room for me for more than a couple consecutive nights.
The first hostel was called Hotel Sphinx on the southern end of town, which was inconvenient because the train station was on the north end. But it was the only place that could take me and was under 50 euro (although only just). I stayed there one night before moving to Hotel Bulldog, which was run by a chain of *ahem* coffee shops. Despite that, it actually turned out to be quite well run, and the best hostel I stayed in of the three. It was clean, quiet (perhaps partially because everyone was so zoned out), and had lots of food (which also follows...), and a couple of nice comfy couches to watch movies (ditto). It was also located right in the heart of Amsterdam's famous red-light district, so I could watch college frat boys walk out of prostitutes' rooms and pop their collars while smirking to their friends, waiting to give them high fives. OK, so that only happened once, but it made an impression. Most of the time you could walk by the prostitutes without even noticing, as they were all down small side alleys. That is, except for the ones who had their offices on the backside of the old church. But if you did go down one of those back alleys, you would be greeted by women in white bikinis with blacklit rooms striking a pose or flirting with male passers-by. Either that or a closed curtain...
Anyhoo, the third hostel I stayed in was also in the red light district, called Hotel the Globe. It had a pub downstairs that was always full of rowdy British, Irish, or Italian football (soccer) fans watching the satellite TV, drinking beer and yelling at each other. The first night in my 8-person room was me, 6 girls, and one guy. But all of the girls left and the next day a group of six rowdy Italian guys moved in and would not ever leave (except at 1am to come back at 6am) or shut up. Sigh. But I did make friends with the cleaning guy who came from Ghana and told me about all of his family that he's supporting back home (three sisters, two brothers, and his mom).
Back on the food note, Amsterdam didn't seem to have a lot of its own "signature" dishes, but they did have a lot of immigrants, and therefore a lot of foreign food (especially Indonesian, for some reason). The unfortunate thing was that this food conformed to Amsterdam prices, which were really high. If I was too cheap to eat out in Paris where there were at least some budget options, there was no way I was going to pay 20 euro for an OK meal in Amsterdam. For under 10 or 15 euro in Paris you could get decent cheap street food and healthy alternatives (fruit, nuts, yoghurt), but the only food in that range in Amsterdam was junk food. We're talking candied apples, donuts, and ice cream. There were always also the french fry stands - actually they call them Flemish Fries as they were invented in Belgium (who knew?) - but grease and mashed potatoes can only keep you going for so long. So I was pretty excited when I discovered a couple of branches of the Maoz falafel chain I had so relied on in Barcelona. It wasn't quite as good as in Barcelona (no chickpeas or cauliflower and the falafel balls were smaller), but it was a meal for 5 euro that would fill me up. And when you need three meals a day and the euro's going for $1.50, after a while I couldn't really afford more than that.
So, yeah, besides eating and sleeping, I did actually do some touristing around in Amsterdam. The main touristy features were the canals that spread in concentric horshoes around the city center and the bicycles that everyone used as a mode of transport. Everywhere you turned there were picturesque canals with dinged up little boats cruising around as locals and tourists alike zipped by on bicycles (or left them stacked artistically on the street). That accompanied by the red brick buildings with the gabled roofs did make quite a romantic little picture. Except that it would not stop f-ing raining, which kind of put a damper (no pun intended) on my desire to take a casual stroll.
And, not being 100% museum-ed out, I did manage to convince myself to go to the Anne Frank House, the Van Gogh Museum, the Photography Museum, and the Rijksmuseum (housing a bunch of Dutch masterpieces). The secret attic of the Anne Frank house was much larger than I had imagined. For some reason I imagined throughout the book that they were all ducking to walk around; I don't know where I got that idea. But if I though reading her diary was pretty personal, it was nothing compared to walking through her room and seeing the posters and magazine clippings she'd pasted on the wall - not to mention her handwriting in the original journal itself. Seeing everyone's pictures and where they slept and ate and listened to the radio made the reality of their deaths that much more horrible.
While that sobering trip was definitely the most compelling of the things I saw in Amsterdam, the others were also worth a visit. The Van Gogh Museum was my second favorite. I especially liked learning about how he started so late and never really mastered all of the technical aspects of painting (he often still used a perspective frame to help him get his sketches right), but was still able to create things that had such an impact on people. It give my artistically challenged self hope, anyway. The painters in the Rijksmuseum were the exact opposite. Apparently the Dutch masters were all about smoothness, detail, and technical precision. Rembrandt's "The Night Watch" might have been exquisitely crafted and a breakthrough in portraying active portraits, but frankly it was boring. I liked Van Gogh better.
The photography museum (FOAM) was kind of like the one in Paris in that they both didn't really seem to have a permanent collection but were just spotlighting certain artists at the moment. The mixup of artists was kind of strange but I particularly liked a retrospective on the work of Jacques Henri Lortigue, a French guy who captured everyday life throughout the 20th century through action shots. His photos were fun, and didn't have some of the over-dramatization of the other artists.
And I almost forgot, there was also the "Heineken Experience," which was a Disneyland version of a brewery tour, even including one of those movies where the floor shakes around (to make you feel like you're a bottle going through the factory). But they give you enough beer that you couldn't actually drink it all without getting completely wasted at 3pm, so that's where my money went I suppose. I went with Chrstine, a Portuguese-Canadian girl just finishing up a couple of years in Ireland organizing skateboarding competitions, who I'd met in the Bulldog hostel and hung out with for a couple of days. That made downing glass after glass of beer at the plastic-feeling bar a little less awkward than it would have been had I gone alone.
Overall, I probably would only have stayed in Amsterdam 3 or 4 days, but I found out the Pride Parade was going to be be that weekend so I decided to stay longer. It was a long time to spend in one place on this kind of trip, and I was getting a bit sick of it in the end. I saw a lot of interesting stuff and met a few cool people, but in the end I got sick of stuff like the frat boy smirking out of the prostitutes' room an people assaulting me on the street corner telling me that I don't really know how to party if I don't come on their expensive all-night bar hopping, binge drinking tour. As a tourist, the place kind of felt like a kids' playground, not to sound like too much of a prude. It was fun for a couple of days, but beyond that a bit tiring. I have no conception what it would be like to live there; I imagine those are two completely different worlds. I realize now that whether I am well-fed or not also has a great deal to do with my mood, and in Amsterdam I wasn't particularly well-fed. So that might have something to do with it... Up to top
posted by Nora @ 8:19 AM
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