...
The NTG Travel Diaries!!! #1
DAY 1: AMSTERDAM
"So, Ben just gave us the entirely wrong address, and we're all in Amsterdam without any way to contact each other. Nice."
***************
I got off my plane into Amsterdam's Schippol airport, after 7 or so hours of being wedged into a seat that would have been hard-pressed to fit a seven year old kid. It was around 11am their time, but the travel and lack of sleep rendered any sense of time irrelevant. KLM Airlines tried to pull a fast one on us on the way over, tried to make it seem like we had slept an entire night on that crowded 747... They served us dinner, then turned off the lights for about three hours, during which they played some brutally chosen American films (Prime and The Family Stone, both with Dutch subtitles), and then turned all the lights on and cheerily served us breakfast. You didn't fool anyone, KLM.
I found the baggage claim and ran directly into Fischer. It's comforting to see a familiar face in a totally foreign country, even if you're expecting to meet anyway. His bag had been delayed getting unloaded from his San Francisco flight, so we waited by the carousel and discussed where to stay.
We decided to check out a place my co-worker Jared had recommended, the Flying Pig near Vondel Park. We made our way to the Centraal* Station, and from there walked a good 20 minutes through the center of the city, getting the lay of the land and admiring their advertisements... such as this one for a new firming lotion:
As we would discover throughout our three days there, that ass was everywhere.
[* - This is not a misspelling. The Dutch language is an odd hybrid of English and German, with tons of extra vowels thrown in with seemingly reckless abandon. And everyone there speaks English anyway, so the total percentage of actual Dutch speaking I heard in three days amounted to about 3%.]
We made our way to the Pig and checked in, dropped our stuff in our room and then went to the basement to get on a computer. Ben had emailed Fischer and told him he was with Aimee at a coffee shop called Doors Palace, at 46 Singel (Street... some of their street names are just one word, while others end in Staat or Straat... yeah, the double A again...). So off we set to track them down. Amsterdam is a city built in concentric rings, separated by canals. So more or less everywhere you go, you'll see canals like this one, often with tour boats or paddleboats full of stoned tourists.
We hopped on a tram (a very common form of transport in A-dam) and got off near Singel, and started walking searching for 46. And here's what we discovered:
[* - These are from Day 2, but they're relevant to Day 1]
46 Singel was clearly not a coffeeshop; it was a private residence. With no way to get in touch with each other directly (none of us had an international cell phone), we tried to find the place by name, using a phone book. Turns out there's more than one coffeeshop based on the band The Doors (no real surprise there)... We were heading toward one at 14 Spuistraat when we saw them ambling toward us. So not only did Ben give us the wrong address entirely, but they actually left the place before we got there, so if we had come five minutes later we wouldn't have seen them at all. Excellent work, Mr. and Mrs. Hill. When we said this to Ben, he just shrugged.
Once we all laughed about it and had some fries (with Dutch mayonnaise, which sounds gross but is actually delicious), we hit a coffeeshop and relaxed for the afternoon. Amsterdam is a great aimless-wandering kind of city, which is ideal for the ever-present marijuana culture. Among the sights:
The famous Rijksmuseum:
The Heineken Brewery (someone should have checked the spelling on the side of the building, there...):
This sloping open-air park, which I think was on a University campus:
And ridiculously tiny cars:
That was an actual, operating car. I should have had someone stand next to it for scale, but it was basically about 70% of the size of your average VW Bug. I also saw this in a store window, and while it has nothing expressly to do with Amsterdam, I still wouldn't have felt right if I didn't get my picture taken with it:
Easily, the most common form of transport in A-dam, and thus a perpetual sight, is BIKES:
There are bikes EVERYWHERE in this city! They probably outnumber the cars, people, buses, and trams combined, and wherever you walk you feel like you're in a bizarre outtake from Pee Wee's Big Adventure. They constantly buzz around you at every intersection, they have their own bike traffic lights and bike lanes, sometimes set apart on their own and sometimes just designated on a normal street by a white line and a spraypainted bicycle logo. All the bikes you see are these heavy, sturdy, no-frills models of utilitarian ugliness, and absolutely NO ONE wears a helmet. Before crossing any street, you have to watch more for approaching bikes than for cars, and most of the riders signal their approach with the stereotypical little "ching-ching" bells on the handlebar. It's just a swirling mass of bicycle-based chaos walking around this city, and after awhile, I started to want to be a part of it. So did Fischer... but there will be more on that tomorrow...
I love this picture... It looks like Aimee is ascending into Bicycle Heaven:
All the bike-dodging made us hungry (yeah... it was just the bike-dodging...) so we settled in for dinner at this Turkish restaurant. They grill a mean salmon.
After dinner, Ben and Aimee headed back to the place they were staying, with a resident couple who rented out their spare room to travelers. Fischer and I retired to the Pig. On the way in, I snapped Fischer's favorite sign:
So apparently "slow down" in Dutch is "let op," and speedbumps are called "drempels." Why do I get the sense that I'll call them drempels for the rest of my life?
By the time we got in, I had been awake for something like 36 hours, so my narrow top bunk was incredibly inviting. I did manage to snap the room a couple times before drifting off into the deep oblivion of exhausted sleep. I like how they included the windmill on the wall, just in case you had forgotten you were... you know... in Holland.
***************
NEXT POST: Amsterdam, Day 2: Bikes, Tulips, The Sex Museum, and BIKES!!!
*****N*T*G*****
Never hesitate to comment!
"So, Ben just gave us the entirely wrong address, and we're all in Amsterdam without any way to contact each other. Nice."
***************
I got off my plane into Amsterdam's Schippol airport, after 7 or so hours of being wedged into a seat that would have been hard-pressed to fit a seven year old kid. It was around 11am their time, but the travel and lack of sleep rendered any sense of time irrelevant. KLM Airlines tried to pull a fast one on us on the way over, tried to make it seem like we had slept an entire night on that crowded 747... They served us dinner, then turned off the lights for about three hours, during which they played some brutally chosen American films (Prime and The Family Stone, both with Dutch subtitles), and then turned all the lights on and cheerily served us breakfast. You didn't fool anyone, KLM.
I found the baggage claim and ran directly into Fischer. It's comforting to see a familiar face in a totally foreign country, even if you're expecting to meet anyway. His bag had been delayed getting unloaded from his San Francisco flight, so we waited by the carousel and discussed where to stay.
We decided to check out a place my co-worker Jared had recommended, the Flying Pig near Vondel Park. We made our way to the Centraal* Station, and from there walked a good 20 minutes through the center of the city, getting the lay of the land and admiring their advertisements... such as this one for a new firming lotion:
As we would discover throughout our three days there, that ass was everywhere.
[* - This is not a misspelling. The Dutch language is an odd hybrid of English and German, with tons of extra vowels thrown in with seemingly reckless abandon. And everyone there speaks English anyway, so the total percentage of actual Dutch speaking I heard in three days amounted to about 3%.]
We made our way to the Pig and checked in, dropped our stuff in our room and then went to the basement to get on a computer. Ben had emailed Fischer and told him he was with Aimee at a coffee shop called Doors Palace, at 46 Singel (Street... some of their street names are just one word, while others end in Staat or Straat... yeah, the double A again...). So off we set to track them down. Amsterdam is a city built in concentric rings, separated by canals. So more or less everywhere you go, you'll see canals like this one, often with tour boats or paddleboats full of stoned tourists.
We hopped on a tram (a very common form of transport in A-dam) and got off near Singel, and started walking searching for 46. And here's what we discovered:
[* - These are from Day 2, but they're relevant to Day 1]
46 Singel was clearly not a coffeeshop; it was a private residence. With no way to get in touch with each other directly (none of us had an international cell phone), we tried to find the place by name, using a phone book. Turns out there's more than one coffeeshop based on the band The Doors (no real surprise there)... We were heading toward one at 14 Spuistraat when we saw them ambling toward us. So not only did Ben give us the wrong address entirely, but they actually left the place before we got there, so if we had come five minutes later we wouldn't have seen them at all. Excellent work, Mr. and Mrs. Hill. When we said this to Ben, he just shrugged.
Once we all laughed about it and had some fries (with Dutch mayonnaise, which sounds gross but is actually delicious), we hit a coffeeshop and relaxed for the afternoon. Amsterdam is a great aimless-wandering kind of city, which is ideal for the ever-present marijuana culture. Among the sights:
The famous Rijksmuseum:
The Heineken Brewery (someone should have checked the spelling on the side of the building, there...):
This sloping open-air park, which I think was on a University campus:
And ridiculously tiny cars:
That was an actual, operating car. I should have had someone stand next to it for scale, but it was basically about 70% of the size of your average VW Bug. I also saw this in a store window, and while it has nothing expressly to do with Amsterdam, I still wouldn't have felt right if I didn't get my picture taken with it:
Easily, the most common form of transport in A-dam, and thus a perpetual sight, is BIKES:
There are bikes EVERYWHERE in this city! They probably outnumber the cars, people, buses, and trams combined, and wherever you walk you feel like you're in a bizarre outtake from Pee Wee's Big Adventure. They constantly buzz around you at every intersection, they have their own bike traffic lights and bike lanes, sometimes set apart on their own and sometimes just designated on a normal street by a white line and a spraypainted bicycle logo. All the bikes you see are these heavy, sturdy, no-frills models of utilitarian ugliness, and absolutely NO ONE wears a helmet. Before crossing any street, you have to watch more for approaching bikes than for cars, and most of the riders signal their approach with the stereotypical little "ching-ching" bells on the handlebar. It's just a swirling mass of bicycle-based chaos walking around this city, and after awhile, I started to want to be a part of it. So did Fischer... but there will be more on that tomorrow...
I love this picture... It looks like Aimee is ascending into Bicycle Heaven:
All the bike-dodging made us hungry (yeah... it was just the bike-dodging...) so we settled in for dinner at this Turkish restaurant. They grill a mean salmon.
After dinner, Ben and Aimee headed back to the place they were staying, with a resident couple who rented out their spare room to travelers. Fischer and I retired to the Pig. On the way in, I snapped Fischer's favorite sign:
So apparently "slow down" in Dutch is "let op," and speedbumps are called "drempels." Why do I get the sense that I'll call them drempels for the rest of my life?
By the time we got in, I had been awake for something like 36 hours, so my narrow top bunk was incredibly inviting. I did manage to snap the room a couple times before drifting off into the deep oblivion of exhausted sleep. I like how they included the windmill on the wall, just in case you had forgotten you were... you know... in Holland.
***************
NEXT POST: Amsterdam, Day 2: Bikes, Tulips, The Sex Museum, and BIKES!!!
*****N*T*G*****
Never hesitate to comment!
posted by JMP at 6:00 PM
3 Comments:
Let op! Drempels = Newest euphemism for getting nowhere with a girl in a bar, as spoken by friendly observer to colleague who is clearly going nowhere. (ex: RJ has rolling eyes in every direction. ZJ and JMP exchange a "Let op! Drempels!" and then go rescue him).
Also: if there is cute girl or boy in your life, I feel it's entirely appropriate to call him or her "my little drempel."
Let op! Drempels
Translate into Watch out speed bumps.
Post a Comment
<< Home