Amsterdam

After Sasha, Keith and I traveled to Brussels by bus, we took a short train ride to visit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. I have always wanted to visit this city because it is often to compared to Portland, Oregon, for its huge number of bike-riders, environmentalism and general hipster attitude. It is also a canal city like Venice!

I saw huge “parking lots” filled with hundreds, maybe thousands, of bikes. Bikers crowded every street and sped down the bike lanes adjacent to every road. The largest park in Amsterdam, Vondelpark, is essentially a highway for bikers to travel. Walkers are outnumbered and are sent to the sidepaths.

I felt like I was back in Venice while walking across the footbridges over the narrow canals. But people didn’t use the canals in Amsterdam for day-to-day travel, as in Venice. Instead, “party-boaters” traveled down the water blasting hip hop and people stood around on the boats holding beers. The canals are beautiful though, lined with flowers and plenty of green trees.

Amsterdam has a famous floating water market, where all of the stalls are on wooden platforms in the canal. They sell dozens and dozens of types of flowers, however not all bulbs can be brought back to the US. The US has really strict requirements on what kinds of produce and flowers can be brought into the country, unlike the UK for example.

The rest of Amsterdam was not as appealing to me. Fast food chains including McDonalds and Burger King were everywhere. All of the food was cheap but fried. Amsterdam is well-known for the fast food chain Febo, which I found pretty fun. It is just like McDonalds but the food is served in little vending machine compartments. It sounds kind of gross, and it is, but there are cooks standing behind the machines putting in fresh burgers as you watch.

There also was the red light district, named for the red-tinted window boxes where the prostitutes work. We visited during the daytime, just for a walk through, and we suddenly realized there were already girls working in some of the windows! I was uncomfortable with the fact that we were just walking right by them. But the girls didn’t seem too bothered–some of them were talking on the phone or chatting with one of their friends.

The rest of the time we spent in museums: the Rijksmuseum with paintings by Vermeer (not Girl with a Pearl Earring) and Rembrandt. I was especially impressed by Rembrandt’s “Night Watch,” a massive floor to ceiling painting of a bunch of soldiers and their captain, who is bathed in a spotlight. I also liked a painting on a surprisingly boring subject, trade officials from the draper’s guild called “The Sampling Officials.” Rembrandt made it interesting because he posed the people in an action shot rather than a frozen one, and tried to make some drama in the scene:

We also visited the Van Gogh Museum, which was under construction. His most famous paintings weren’t even on display! Oh well, at least it was free since I borrowed my friend’s museum pass. Finally, we posed by the “I Amsterdam” sign located in the museum plaza:

Sasha, Keith and I!