First Time Visiting Amsterdam
AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
Amsterdam, a city that when you tell people that you are going, they assume you are going to party late into the night and sleep the days away. Whether it be the late night bars, the famous red light district or the coffee shops that sell a little more than coffee, there is plenty of debauchery to be found. For the most part, though, I stayed clear of these places and opted for wandering the more scenic sites, the canals.
I arrived around 10:00 PM on Friday night so I checked into my hostel, Aivengo, and got settled before heading out to orient myself to the city. After all, the night was young and I had just napped on the plane. At Dam SquTEare there was a carnival, complete with a ferris wheel and other rides. I am not sure if this is a permanent setup or if it was just there temporarily but it looked like a great place to do some long exposure photography. Capturing the neon lights against the backdrop of old buildings made for a neat contrast. I came back several times during my days here and one of the nights, I even took a ride on the ferris wheel to get a higher vantage point of the city. The first night, though, I wandered around for a while more before deciding to get some sleep.
The next day I wanted to explore the canals and decided to do so the way the locals do, by bike. I stopped by HotelScooters to pick one up before heading to Bloemenmarkt, the floating flower market. Bloemenmarkt is a couple blocks of floating boats selling flowers and the like. In the brick and mortar shops on the other side of the street are plenty of cheese shops with their bright yellow cheese wheels lined up perfectly in the windows. As it was Saturday, it was very congested so I decided to move on.
I made my way over to the Van Gogh Museuem and Rijksmuseum. This is also the plaza that houses one of the sets of famous I AMSTERDAM letters. It was amusing to watch the tourist climb all over the letters to take their selfies, each one trying to outdo the others for the most creative photo. I wanted to see more of the canals before the sun set, which happens to be very late in Amsterdam, around 9:30PM.
Seven bridges is a cool place where you can see, as the name states, seven bridges in a row as they cross one of the canals. Seven bridges is a great place for photos, as is Magere Brug (skinny bridge), which is where I ended up for sunset . For some long exposures at night I went to the intersection of Keizersgracht & Leidsegracht. I also wandered back to the skinny bridge to take some night shots before making my way over to Rembrandtplein for some dinner.
Rembrandtplein is another plaza, this one housing a statue of Rembrandt. I ended up eating at a chain restaurant called Wok to Walk. It was really good but I am still not sure what the local food happens to be. I saw a lot of woks, Argentinian restaurants and burger restaurants. There are also the dessert places that sell waffles covered in all sorts of stuff, as long as that stuff includes Nutella. It seems as though the people of Amsterdam cover everything in Nutella. I had never tried it so I decided to give it a whirl, a waffle covered in Nutella, please. The first few bites were good but then the richness of the Nutella started to set in and I couldn't finish it. I guess I can see the draw but only in very limited quantities.
The next two days were more of the same, visiting shops and wandering the canals. There are so many of both of them to explore, it is no wonder that Amsterdam is the Venice of the north. I did manage to make it by Anne Frank's house. This was the place that her and her family hid from the Nazis during the time that she wrote her famous diary. It is right in the heart of town but seems too commercialized, as there are tourist lines all hours of the day, everyday.
Finally, no tour to the Netherlands could be complete without a visit to a windmill. I wanted to go out into the country to see some but with my compacted schedule, didn't have time. I was able to find one right in town so I stopped by for a visit and some breakfast at the base of the windmill on my last morning. This gave me a chance to plan for my next city, Brussels.
Alright, I guess if you made it this far, I will tell you about the more famous or infamous parts of the city. Fortunate for me, unfortunate for you, I don't partake in any kind of recreational drugs so I can't tell you much about the coffee shops/cafes. They are plentiful all around the city and seem to do quite the business, but how that all works, I don't know exactly. The red light district, at least from what I thought, was a seedy area which turns out to not be the case. It is an area where tons of tourist are, everyone usually ends up here at some point in the night as it seems to be the heart of the nightlife area. This is where a lot of the bars and nightlife in the city are located. It is definitely different to walk down the street and see window after window aglow in red with scantily clad girls trying to coerce the guys to come inside. There are also sex museums and even shows where you watch girls perform tricks, similar to Thailand, and even couples that have sex on stage. Amsterdam is definitely a city that you could get in trouble in, therefore, I am onto Brussels before that happens.
