Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
The title of this blog literally sums up what we've seen so far of Amsterdam. Of course there's a lot more to it, but when you're a tourist with just three days here that's what you're mostly exposed to!
Amsterdam is absolutely mental. It's more of a place you go to for the activities rather for the attractions, if that makes sense. In New York or Paris you could spend days literally just walking around and checking out the main sights and buildings (which is what we did), whereas here you have to actually find activities to do.
We've spent three days here now and it's been a cool experience. Our accommodation is located RIGHT in the centre of Amsterdam so that's been really convenient - it's called the "Flying Pig Hostel Downtown" and is part of the European chain "St. Christophers". I'd definitely recommend it - a yummy breakfast is included, plus has smoking room (for people coming here to smoke weed), perfect location, big bar inside etc!
So we've done quite a few things but I'll just list my favourites.
Cheese tasting - most places charge you quite a bit to do this - usually around the 15euro mark. But if you're sneaky you can find places that do it for free! There is a place right by our hostel that does it, so we got to try like 25 cheeses for free! There were heaps of yummy ones - my favourite at the pesto flavoured ones, argh!! You also get to watch cheese being made in the store, and the staff are all dressed up funny.
Vondel Park - was pretty, and big. Unfortunately it was raining quite a bit when we went to check it out, but I imagine during the summer time it would be a really cool place to hang out. There are heaps of ponds and people cycling EVERYWHERE! Literally everywhere you look in all of Amsterdam people are cycling. I've never seen so many bikes in my whole life as I have the past three days.
Red Light District - this is probably the biggest attraction in all of Amsterdam and is where there is the most things to see and do. It's pretty extreme though. I found it really shocking that any one chooses Amsterdam as their family holiday destination because the whole place seems to be all about prostitution and drugs. So it's REALLY dumb when you see people walking with their children through the red light district.
It's a pretty wild place. It's hard because - for those who don't know me, I've done heaps of work and research about human trafficking. So I obviously read up heaps about Amsterdam before we arrived and read about how bad human trafficking is in this city. So it's quite sickening walking around the city and knowing that the vast majority of the prostitutes here are only here by force. When you walk around the main streets and through alley ways, there are heaps of like cubicles in the buildings that have a prostitute in with a glass window so people can look and choose a prostitute as they're walking past. Most of them are just in their underwear. When we were walking around earlier we heard one guy ask one of them where she was from, and she said Bulgaria. Of course not all of the girls there are forced to be, some are there because they want to be, but from reading and looking at the Prostitution Information Center here, a huge proportion of girls from Eastern Europe have been trafficked. So I always wonder which girls are there because they want to be and which have been trafficked.
There are also lots of other weird things along the red light district, such as live sex shows and "coffee shops". The coffee shops here are basically places you can go and buy/smoke weed. Most have a "less interesting menu" at the front, where you can look at the different coffees etc. But if you ask them for the "more interesting menu", you get the list of all the drugs. They're very liberal about it all here. Like even if you're walking past an electronics store they will have a sign saying they sell magic mushrooms too.
We also spent a few hours going for nice walks along the canals. Amsterdam is a really pretty place. All of the buildings are very different from each other, and there are canals everywhere with little tour boats going through. Bikes are attached to everything in the city, including bridges and along pathways. We have seen a few bridges that have a couple of padlocks on, obviously trying to copy the bridges in Paris - but they haven't been very successful. There are heaps of cobbled streets everywhere too. It seems to be quite a standard thing in Europe. When we were walking along the canals we found the Anne Frank Haus. I assume most people will know what this means, but for those who don't, Anne Frank is famous for keeping a diary during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands! Her family went in to hiding in a house here in Amsterdam, but unfortunately the story ends pretty sadly. There is a museum in the same house, but the queue is always MASSIVE :( But it was interesting thinking about how where we were walking is the same place as where Nazis would have been running around collecting Jewish people. It's very tragic. One of the trips our school arranges in Warsaw is down to the area where Auschwitz is, so we will learn a lot more about the holocaust very soon.
We also met up with a girl who studies at the same school we will be going to in Poland! It was great because we got to ask her heaps of questions about Warsaw :) We went and got some yummmmmmmmy food including fries with vinegar (AHH NZ you need to do this more) and brownie covered in melted dark chocolate.
We were pretty lucky because we arrived here without doing any research before as to what we could do here. But a guy who was sharing our room gave us a list his friend made (who used to live here) so we followed that. It included things like taking a canal tour, cheese tasting, cycling through Vondel Park, etc. I'll post it up soon because it'll be really useful for other people going to Amsterdam.
Oh yeah there's HEAPS of English people here. Literally tonnes. All I hear is English accents.
Tonight we head to Berlin, woop! Our bus is overnight and will take like ten hours so that'll be challenging, but ohhhh well. I'm really excited because I'm super interested in Cold War history/politics so I'll get to see lots of the stuff I've learnt about in classes! I think we're there for like 3 nights, four days - and then we finally head to Poland :)
P.s. the smoking room in our hostel just got closed so they can give it a quick clean (it's got lots of beds and couches for all the stoned people to mooch on) - they obviously had to kick everyone out so now the bar is just full of giggling stoners. hahahaha.
- comments
Agata <3 :) :) Red Light District was awesome for our first walk :P (btw I really have to solve an equation to post something? ;) )