e u r o b l o g

Number of postcards written and addressed: 5

Number of postcards sent: 0

That’s right everybody. Seriously though, this is the best I’ve ever done with postcards. The one I wrote in Florence was the first one to get past having a person’s name written on the address line. I swear, next time I see a post office I will send these.

I did manage to find a few (hundred) “potcards” here, but I’m not going to pay 1€ for a cheap gag gift for my parents… sorry! I’ve been paying around ,20€ for postcards, so forgive me if I find 1€ to be a bit much.

Anyway, I was going to mention our awesome tour guide and the more interesting sights around the city, but Amanda seems to have covered that pretty fully already.

I figured I should check in at least once though since my family has been clammering from the peanut gallery for a post from me. Sorry about that, it’s just that we all have access to this at the same times and Amanda is doing it. I know we said there would be pictures too, but, like I said in a comment a while back, most internet cafes (if they have USB ports at all) don’t like us to upload pictures. Everybody will see them and get the rest of our stories when we get home. I’ve got a few good ones for you Dave! But they are for another time.

I will say one thing about Holland though (while I’m here and everybody else is asleep): I really respect their social policy. Basically, the government here says that as long as it isn’t harming anybody and they can make money off of it then it’s allowed. Curiously, marijuana is actually entirely illegal here (contrary to popular belief), but the government decided years ago that it would be just as productive to flush their money literally “down the drain” as it would be to try and fight marijuana cultivation, consumption, and possession. How novel! Let’s spend the country’s money on fighting hard drugs like cocaine and heroin instead of chasing down college students smoking pot. Incidentally, Holland not only has the smallest percentage of hard drug users in Europe it also has the smallest percentage of pot smokers (about half of the USA’s).

How can pot be such a lucrative business in a city where nobody smokes it? Tourists!

So the Dutch government struck gold by saying that people can smoke here, attracting stupid college students from all over the world (of course, they are mostly Americans) to their coffeeshops.

Damn, government is cool when it makes sense. Maybe one day the US will realize that chasing stoners isn’t going to accomplish anything. I’d settle for the Olympic commitee moving pot out of the “performance-enhancing” drug category, but you know…

Sorry, I think I went off on a tangent there for a minute (especially when you consider that I only had “one thing” to say about Holland). Ok, looking back, that rant might make me look like some finally-justified, marijuana enthusiast and that’s not really the point. None of us have smoked anything (rest easy parents), I just thought it was an awesome idea by the Dutch government. Kudos!

Alright, I’m hungry, so I’m going to go wake everybody up and get a burger or something.

Cheers!

–Cameron

…are all things in which we are not partaking, don’t worry.

We are, however, staying in the red light district here in Amsterdam, which seemed a little sketchy at first but has turned out to be pretty nice, for a few reasons:

1) Our tour guide (more on that later) assured us that it is the safest part of town, as there are a ton of cops around;

2) We’re really close to everything–we have walked everywhere, which saves lots of money;

3) Our hostel fulfills my definition of What Is Great About Large Cities, namely, that I am within easy walking distance of greasy Asian food 24 hours a day. (Something I took advantage of last night. Mmm. I’d been craving something that’s not a cheese sandwich or pizza for days.)

The main downside of the location, frankly, is that every time I lie down for a nap I realize that my hair smells like weed.

Yesterday we got into the city at around 9 a.m. We found our hostel, dumped our backpacks, and then wandered around for a few hours–including a trip to the main shopping street, where Steph and I bought Bov some really good-looking jeans from H&M for his birthday. We got a brochure for a free walking tour of Amsterdam that left at 3 p.m., so we headed to the train station to catch that.

Well, it ended up being a really awesome tour–four hours of a British guy who had an encyclopedic memory reciting all kinds of random, interesting facts about Amsterdam and its rather unique…um, everything. So we tipped him, because he was really good, and because despite all the museums we’ve visited, those four hours were by far the most educational of the entire trip. It was really good. And I am completely in love with Amsterdam–this is going on my “places to live when I become an ex-pat” list. All the cities we’ve seen have been amazing, but Amsterdam is probably my favorite. (Or Paris. And London, of course, but we haven’t been there yet on this trip.)

Today we went to a museum in a church in the main square, which had an exhibit about fashion through the ages. I really liked it (they even had a dress-up area with hoop skirts and stuff!) but the guys were (unsurprisingly) less than thrilled. Afterwards we went to the Dutch Resistance Museum, which was a more pleasant follow-up to our trip to Dachau on our last day in Munich (something that I, being a World War II buff, had really wanted to do, and it was really interesting and really worthwhile).

Anyway, it was one of the best museums I’ve ever seen–we’ve seen some pretty badly organized exhibits among all the places we’ve been, but this was perfect. It was well laid-out, and it integrated various forms of media–video, artifacts, print, audio, hands-on stuff, etc.–incredibly well. It was brilliantly designed, and historically right up my alley, so that was great.

Tomorrow evening we fly out to London, so we’ll see what the security situation is like flying into the U.K. I can’t lie–it’ll be good to get into a hostel that doesn’t have a skeevy bar on the ground floor (this is the second one–the hotel in Lyon did, too). And hopefully it’ll have a kitchen, too, so we can eat cheaply and well again. That pesto baguette I bought earlier today won’t last the rest of the trip, after all.

–Amanda