Give Me the Red Light…
April 16, 2012 Leave a comment
And so begins the barrage of travel-related blog posts…
If I had to pick one word to describe how I felt about Amsterdam, it would be FUN.
If you haven’t been to Amsterdam before, some parts of the city are exactly what you imagine it to be. Namely, weed and prostitutes. In fact, I had the most fun in Amsterdam in the Red Light District, where my roommate Andrew and I did some unmentionables that would compromise my blog’s PG rating if I typed them up. However, the city is much more than a giant Spencer’s. It’s beautiful, relaxed, and contains a ton of cool history and culture that’s tragically overlooked.
My adventures in the Netherlands started when my friend Dylan and I finally arrived after a 15-hour overnight train ride from Copenhagen. The journey was made miserable by an army of small children who must have been on speed, but after sneaking off to an empty bed, the rest of the trip was smooth sailing. We quickly found our hostel, aptly titled Youth Hostel Meetingpoint, and dropped our bags off in our 18-bed room before setting off to see the sights.
Unsurprisingly, the city was packed with tourists, even for a Monday and Tuesday. I also expected the abundance of marijuana and sex paraphernalia, along with the houseboats and elaborate canals I remembered from my last brief trip here in 2006. There were a few things, however, I was immediately taken aback by. I knew Amsterdam was one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world, but I didn’t how bike-obsessed the Dutch are. The Danes love to bike in Copenhagen, but there aren’t PARKING GARAGES JUST FOR BIKES. I was also surprised that the Red Light District was simply a street in the middle of the city, when I expected it to be more of a closed-off, isolated community. The Red Light District is open 24/7 by the way; it was a little jarring seeing the prostitutes in their glass cases during the daytime.
After a photoshoot on the “I Amsterdam” sign, Dylan and I went to the Van Gogh Museum and the FOAM (International Photography Museum). We couldn’t take pictures at either, which was a shame since there were photo-worthy exhibits around every corner. FOAM was dedicated to photojournalism, and had exhibits on 9/11, the progression of Times Square, movie stars, Olympic athletes, etc. As for Van Gogh, I didn’t know much (or anything) about him before, but I was astounded reading about this guy’s life. Did you know that he didn’t have any artistic experience as a child, and just decided to become an artist during adulthood? WHO DOES THAT?
That night, Dylan and I met up with Andrew and set off to see if the nightlife lived up to the hype. While we mostly stayed in low-key, casual bars, we did meet our fair share of characters. My favorite person from the night was a sassy English bartender named Anna; when she asked us a grammar question and we sided with her friend instead of her, she pretended to be furious and gave us shit for the rest of the night. Her friend ended up buying us free jaeger, so the moral of the story is: knowing grammar can lead you to free booze. Stay in school, kids.
The next morning, Dylan and I waited in line for an hour to see the Anne Frank house, which I had read about since sixth grade. We couldn’t take pictures here either, but I wouldn’t have been able to capture the power of the house with my crappy point-and-shoot. I was moved by the persistence and resilience of the family (along with Otto Frank, who had to live for decades after World War II after all his family and friends had died) and the power of the written word. It blew my mind to think that thousands of people come to this site every year solely because a teenage girl decided to write about her life. The simplest things truly can be the most beautiful.
To wrap up my time in Amsterdam, I decided to rent a bike and ride around the city for a couple hours. After a bit of confusion and almost being hit by cars, I got the hang of the ridiculously easy bike routes and saw almost the entire city (which is only 85 square miles) in two and a half hours. I can now cross “biking in a city” off my bucket list…along with some of the unmentionables I wrote about in the beginning of this post.
Overall, Amsterdam was a blast but I’m definitely not in a rush to come back anytime soon. I would like to see other areas of the Netherlands, especially since I didn’t get to see windmills or the “real Netherlands”. I also left with a lot of questions about the ethics of prostitution and the exploitation of women (a topic which also came up in Budapest), which could fill ten blog posts if I actually managed to organize my thoughts. Again, it’s one of the best cities to visit if you want to have fun, but it definitely wasn’t one of the highs of my trip. Pun intended.