Amsterdam!

The idea of Amsterdam conjures up significantly different images depending on who you’re speaking to. On the one hand, it’s known as a liberal, anything-goes party city where college kids flock for a couple days of debauchery. To others, it’s the tulip capital of the world, and its bike-friendly layout is an ideal place to relax. Even more, it’s known as an arts and cultural center, influencing many of the masters such as Rembrandt and Van Gogh. If you ask a Dutch person, you would probably get an answer along the lines of it being a cosmopolitan city built upon canals and offering a selection of just about anything you could ask for, or kind of a cross between Paris and Venice.

In truth, Amsterdam is one of the oldest major cities in Europe (depending on how you define "major", but just go with me here…) It’s a center of banking, consulting, engineering, and of course, cannabis-growing. As mentioned, the city is built upon canals, and it has an extremely good restaurant scene and night-life (by "extremely good", I mean "you can get a meal for under $20 and it doesn’t taste like it’s been microwaved"). As you can imagine, the city attracts both a creative and a naturalist crowd, which translates into a very cool vibe.

Our first day there, we decided we’d start with the tulip-thing, so we ventured outside the city to see the fields upon fields of, well, tulips. Which reminds me – what’s better than roses on your piano? Oh wait – my parents might be reading this…anyway - we went to the Keukenhoff Gardens, which is the single largest bulb-garden in the world. This place, if you have any interest whatsoever in flowers, is awesome. Millions upon millions of brightly-colored flora, most of which I don’t know enough about to name. We spent a few hours here, and it could have been more – but we had some serious walking left to do.

So, back in Amsterdam, we started looking for places to shop. When I say "we", I mean "Sophia and Wendy", because they’re girls, and shopping in foreign cities is one of those things girls apparently like to do. Yeah – Wendy decided to travel with us, and if living with a married couple didn’t scare her away from couple-hood, then traveling with us surely did! Anyway, Soph’s ankle wasn’t having anything to do with this shopping thing, so it proceeded to twist itself for no apparent reason. The bad part about this was that it was a pretty bad sprain (in Soph’s defense, she gutted out the next two days like a champ). The good news was that it got us out of shopping, and gave us an excuse to find a Belgian beer bar and get some drinks! Belgian beer rules, and there’s lots of it in Amsterdam – almost as much as there is in Belgium. So that was pretty much Friday, as the combination of getting up at pre-8:00 am and a foot injury allowed for us to not feel guilty for going home and to bed before midnight (although the excuse of "being in our thirties" should probably suffice).

Saturday we went to the Van Gogh museum, which still gets high marks on my "things that make a museum great" list. A handful of great paintings, it’s not too overwhelming, and you don’t have to waste your entire day there. I think we were done in about two hours, and I totally felt like I got to look at every painting rather than just rushing through. After that we took a walking tour of the old city, which was pretty sweet, as Amsterdam has a very underrated history. I personally feel you could write a great thesis on why capitalism is good or bad, based solely on the history of Amsterdam, but I’m not sure why you would want to do that. Anyway – Saturday night we stayed out a little later, but we still need to step our game up if we’re to continue pretending we can hang with the under-thirty crowd.

Sunday, we were sad we had to leave – at least Soph was, because there were cheap Chinese take-out places all over the city, and she can’t get that anywhere in Geneva! I think she had Chinese more times in the three days we were there, then she’s had in the nine months we’ve lived in Geneva combined. Chinese food aside, we were all surprised at how big Amsterdam is. The city is massive! You could walk for hours and hours and still not get to the other side. So we walked a bit more, went to the flower market, bought some tulips, then went shopping. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get out of that.

The thing with Amsterdam is that there’s simply so much to do there; you can take trains outside the city, visit windmills, go on bike tours, or, as we did, just walk around. For hours. So we might have to go back again. Maybe when the tulips start blooming next spring…

Next weekend: Grocery shopping in France!