prostitutes, pornography, and pot
…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