6:00 PM Amsterdam
Sorry
for delay on daily blog posts! Andy and I had a bit too much fun last night in
our hostel in Amsterdam and I was not in a good shape for writing ;) Yesterday
we enjoyed the room in Brussels and since the whole town was dead (because it
was Sunday), we headed back to Brussels Midi station quite early for our 4 PM
train to Amsterdam. The train to
Amsterdam was overbooked so we actually did not have seats – we were allowed to
look for empty seats after departure in our designated coach cars but there were
none available. So even though we paid
over 70€ for our tickets, we had to sit in the entrance area with everyone’s
luggage. Awesome. It wasn’t so bad, though, honestly, because there were small
pull down seats – we just had to watch out for luggage tipping over on us. By the time we had passed Rotterdam, there
were enough empty seats for us :) Want to avoid this happening to you?? Book well in advance! Two days is not enough apparently. Lol.
The
Amsterdam central train station is only a 10 minute walk (if that!) to our
hostel downtown - Flying Pig Downtown. We’re right in the
middle of the action in this city that never sleeps. We’re surrounded by clothing stores, cafes,
restaurants, bars, and special Amsterdam “coffee shops”. For those of you not familiar with “coffee
shops”, they are special bars where you can smoke weed, drink coffee, beer,
whatever you want. We’re also right down
the street from the Red Light District – on our walk to lunch we see girls in
the windows beckoning you to come inside.
Prostitution is considered like any other job in the Netherlands, they are
protected by the government and pay taxes on their earnings. They are also taken care of if they contract
HIV – the government here will give them some sort of equivalent of
unemployment benefits and a place to live. The purpose is to keep the business
as clean and classy as prostitution gets. Ha.
Amsterdam isn’t really known for
any really big attractions, like the Eifel Tower or something, but tourists
from all over the world flock here to enjoy the Netherlandish life pleasures…
sex and weed :P The
souvenir shops are raunchier than your local Spencers (I hope mom likes the
penis shaped salt and pepper shakers I got her!) and there are sex shops and
head shops (drug paraphernalia shops) more often than Starbucks in Chicago’s
loop. The markets sell cannabis lollipops
and on the first night we went looking for a hoodie for Andy (he didn’t bring
one because the weather was supposed to be warmer… and he thought people would
start noticing that he was in the same long sleeved sweater in every picture!)
and we had a really hard time finding one that wasn’t obscene (didn’t have drug
references, sex references, etc).
Out of pure curiosity we wandered
around into the sex shops, saw some porn titles I REALLY didn’t need to see
(some people are into really sick things…) and quickly wandered out. We paid 4€ to go to the sex museum – inside it
had some really tacky/raunchy mannequins but it also talked about sex
throughout the ages, the development of the porn industry and even had some of
the earliest porn strips (photographs from the late 19th century). It even had ~2.5ft stone penis carved in the
Roman Age! That took some dedication :P
For dinner, Andy had a traditional
Dutch meal called Hutspot. It was a soup
with a giant meatball and more mashed potatoes than I could ever eat. We agree that the food here isn’t worth
raving about and we’ll save our money by eating street food for the rest of our
time here. After dinner we wandered into
a 70’s themed bar (not really on purpose… there were so many bars, we were
overwhelmed with the decision of picking one..) and met a nice Romanian couple
(the girl was sucking a cannabis lollipop… lol) but just had one drink because
they were pricey. I had full intentions
of writing this last night… but there is a very good deal on beer pitchers at
our hostel bar… so uh… well that answers that ;)
This is the first place where we’ve
really given up all our privacy. We’re
staying at this wonderful youth hostel in a 32-person dorm. The reception desk is attached to the bar
that is serving beer and food from 10:30AM to 3AM. There is a smoking room but
it is closed off so the whole place doesn’t smell like smoke. For those of you wondering – we are not
taking part of in legal weed consumption… mainly because I have to take a pee
test for my new job the week I get back!
Apparently my other 2 pee tests this year weren’t adequate for
them. The entire city smells like weed,
but you can definitely still enjoy Amsterdam without smoking! Anyway, the 32-person room has sections of
beds, our main sleeping area has 3 sets of twin sized bunk beds and 1 set of
full size bunk beds. We have a locker
(it’s literally just a box) next to our bed that we can lock with our
padlocks. The toilets are okay… very
small, but manageable. The bedroom has
about 3 or 4 sinks so you don’t have to haul your things to the tiny and kind
of icky bathroom stalls. The shower room
is VERY nice, actually, I wouldn’t go in there barefoot or anything, but if we’re
comparing it to a dorm shower room, it’s quite nice.
That’s all for now, we had a
fantastic day exploring the city but I’ll write about that in the next post :)
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