This post comes straight from the Flying Pig hostel in downtown old Amsterdam!
Amsterdam's pretty awesome, as one would expect. The best thing I probably did was go on a free tour walking around the city, our guide was an Aussi of course, and pretty good. Joe (our guide) showed us a bunch of really cool things, and went into a bunch of the history of Amsterdam too, he knew alot about the city, which was awesome.
I've got some pics I'd like to share below:
They do have some cool tags, like everywhere, but this one is really common. The three X's have been associated with Amsterdam for hundreds of years, and no one really knows where they came from exactly. But they are put with skulls quite often, and are found on lots of things all around town, like light poles, man holes, buildings, bike racks, buses, clocks, pretty much everything.
Here's the pipe organ in the 'New Church' which is actually hundreds of years old. If you can see the people for scale, this thing is huge, and really impressive when its open! Those people were practicing for a concert that night, so the atmosphere inside the church was amazing!
We also listened to the 'guardian of the pipes'( no kidding, thats his title) play a concert, and realizing that the organ is 300 years old, its awesome that it could have been built.
This is a view from tallest church tower in the city, and it specifically shows the Anne Frank house. Can't see it? Well was meant to be hidden. It is the small black triangle above the black building in the front, about 40% in from the left of the picture, connnected to the white house with a triangular roof.
The bricks on this building failed and is condemned I assume, but they put paintings on the windows, pretty cool.
So the buildings here lean, and usually there solution is to straighten the floors, and then forget about it. Here's the eventual conclusion! Notice how the building next to it is still occupied, even though it, itself is using the failed building to support itself.
Here is an excellent view of the variety in the buildings. The heights, design, and width vary, with no standards, its amazing!
O yah, did I mention the buildings lean? Check this one out, thats crazy!
Like I had before, the Amsterdamians had a really cool system of identification. They had cartoons on the buildings showing what the purpose was. Here's a really complex one, and in color. Obviously its been restored, but i think that they should bring this back!
This is a picture of what I have dubbed, the 'Wind Clock' cause I'm pretty sure it shows the wind direction, like that is really important or something...So the big party night (you gotta have one of those in Amsterdam!) we started it at the hostel, as they had pretty cheap pitchers. Robyn, Me, and our new friend Matt (an Aussi) headed out to the red light district after a short while. And you all know whats in the red light district, ladies fo Sale! You can't take pictures so I can't show you unfortunately, but we did learn some valuable lessons.
For starters, the starting price is 50 euros, and then rises with increasing complexity, just be creative to imagine what that means...
We saw many people partaking in these services, and cheering when buddies came out to their friends, or awkwardly dashing away. The gross part is the turnaround, right after someone leaves, they are back to work, eying up people, gross!
Annnnd, you can get rejected if she doesn't like you, which is awesome, imagine how humiliating that would be!
An interesting fact is that the narrower the alleyway, the better the merchandise gets, which is why the ladies bordering on a little square with public urinals were sick and the ones in the 3 foot wide alley were jaw dropping! Hooker shopping was a great way to spend a night in Amsterdam!
Heres a funny story, we bought some food from the grocery store, including a bottle of wine. We didn't have baskets on our bikes so we split up the food and each put some under the spring holder things on the front of the bike. Now I had the wine and it was pretty secure for a couple hours. Later on in the day, I guess it had come a little loose. So going over some bumps in the middle of an intersection, the wine slips out of the bag, an shatters on the bike forks, splashing wine and glass all over me, and exploding on the ground, glass and wine everywhere! Now its not like I was going to stop and pick up all the wine and glass, with cars and bikes and people everywhere in the intersection, so I did the next best thing, started laughing hysterically and pedaled really fast to get out of there!! Cause come on, it was like this wine just exploded at my feet... in Amsterdam!!! It was really funny at the time! :)
Things I'll remember about Amsterdam:
Canals everywhere, pretty cool.
Cool old people who'll talk to you forever if you let them.
Really bad street performers.
Bikes everywhere, parked, in pieces, and all rickety and crappy.
Tourists everywhere, the places without tourists are way better!
Leaning buildings and awesome architecture.
Too much ice cream!
The best cheese in the world, and its cheap!
O of course, naked ladies in the windows and pot absolutely everywhere!
This is just part one, part two should hopefully be better organized...
Looks like you've got some competition with the travel blogs!
ReplyDeleteKeep up the good work.
Amsterdam is AWESOME! We went on a boat ride just to look at and learn about the roof shapes! Crazy! Did you go in the Anne Frank house? that was awesome to (in a different way) I would highly reccomend it!
ReplyDeleteHaha Rachel, well I'm just glad that people are reading both of ours!
ReplyDeleteYa I did go in, it was really interesting, they have a much different view of WW2 then we do, I found it interesting to learn about it from their perspective.
And Anne Frank was bad ass, her writing is very impressive for how old she was.