Spring Break Destination 1 - Amsterdam, Holland
We arrived in Amsterdam at night after a long train ride from Düsseldorf and attempted to find our Boatel. Now for those of you who don't know a boatel is it is a Hostel + Boat = Boatel. Meaning its awful. The boat is about 100ft long and the rooms are 6 x 6. So the four of us packed into this box dropped our stuff and got the hell out of there. The woman was really nice though and she gave us a map of Amsterdam and pointed out some areas to go for good nightlife including the red-light district. So obviously being quite intrigued by the red-light district and since it was on the way to the main drag we elected to walk down it. The commercial breakdown of the area is as follows: Coffee shop, Sex shop, Whore house, Strip club and repeat. It was quite overwhelming to walk down these few blocks. The girls are allowed to tap on the glass and get your attention and they make weird faces at you. Its quite disturbing I guess because its something you really aren't ready for. After that journey we found the main square where there are bunches of clubs and bars. It is very touristy there and you can hear people speaking in almost every language. Fortunately for us almost everyone in Amsterdam spoke English. Thank God because Dutch is such an awful language to try and understand. Since we were on trains the whole day after having a few beers in the bar we decided to go back to Boatel and rest. I think every time I hear or say the word Boatel for the rest of my life I may cringe. So day two comes about and we go and check out of Boatel Zebra and on to the next one since we couldn't get two nights in the same boat. They are sooo popular… We decide to go to the train station and get our train tickets for Paris the following day. Well apparently to pick up train tickets for Paris at the station in Amsterdam you have to go to Brussels. Yea that's right to Brussels. So we ended up having to cancel those and buy new tickets for the 8am train the next morning. Well we finally made it out on the town and our first stop was the Heineken Brewery. It wasn't too expensive and you got three free beers with it and you could talk all the pictures you wanted. We had blast in there. We learned about how its made and why it tastes the way it does and all that fun stuff and the Heineken from the brewery was the best I've ever tasted. From there we went over to the I AMsterdam sign and took all the touristic pictures we possibly could. We ate and went back to the boat to grab a little siesta before the night. So that night we made our way back down to Rembrant Square and went to a nice bar to sit and relax instead of clubbing since I don't much care for going to clubs without my girlfriend. We were trying to get home before it got to late but we lost Rob and Kyle and had to wait for them outside and ended up running into a really nice group of British kids who hung out with us while we waited for Kyle and Rob. So finally made it home and woke up 4 hours later to board a train to Paris
Walking around Amsterdam was incredible. The whole city is built around canals. Each building is brick of different colors and they are all so different. But this difference allows them to fit together. Even though we didn't get great weather the city was still awesome. Regardless of all of the "offerings" the city has walking around and in between all the canals was gorgeous especially at night when they are all lit up and full of people. Amsterdam is very cool that it is scaled to the pedestrian. All the streets are very narrow on the interior of the city and the buildings are no more than 5 stories high and most roads are inaccessible by car except for the ring highway outside of the city. But we only had two days there and it was on to Paris.
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