Amsterdam seems to be the ideal second city. Holland is a very bilingual country. You'll be greeted in Dutch, and then whoever you're talking to will immediately transition into English as soon as they hear you speaking it. It's a great way to begin our journey onto the Continent. We arrived yesterday and acquainted ourselves with our surroundings. We headed from the plane to Amsterdam Central station, then took a tram (streetcar) to the stop nearest our hostel. One of the hardest parts about navigating Amsterdam seems to be wrapping our heads around the street names. The words are hard to retain mentally when you can't pronounce them, since you ultimately just try to remember cognates or sequences of letters. Anyway, this hostel is simply palatial compared to the previous one, which wasn't bad at all. The room is much larger, much better lit, and much cleaner. There's a bathroom with shower right there, and each bed has a locker, light, and plug. Very convenient.
Once we settled in, we decided to see the sights. We wandered around for a long while in the city, looking for something to eat. It's very difficult to navigate the streets here as well. They drive on the proper (American) sides of the road, but to cross the street, you have to take hoardes of bicyclists, cars, and the tram into account. Bikes here are all treated just like real traffic, complete with stoplights lower down on the light posts and anything.
The city is gorgeous. Lots of little quaint houses (all of which have pulley systems on the top that we discovered are for lifting things up to the higher floors) on tight streets packed up next to each other. The canals are full of boats zipping about, and everything is very busy, though doesn't feel rushed or cold like New York or anything. Speaking of cold though... it's a bit like coming to Rochester. The weather's been quite chilly, and it rains on and off through the day, and this apparently isn't unexpected, and doesn't really seem to faze anybody. We searched for cheap food for a while, eventually settling on a little pizzaria called Salvatore's (who'd have thought?). We got two 33cm pizzas for 8 Euro each. It was a tiny little hole in the wall occupied solely by the owner's family gathered around the TV watching How I Met Your Mother captioned in Dutch and two old guys playing cards on the only table. There were pictures on the walls of famous Italians, including Pavarotti, whom Michael thought was Napoleon. We found our way back to the hostel where we enjoyed our pizza with a pitcher of beer. Yum! Then we went wandering around for a while longer and settled in a coffee shop for a while before coming back in the cold (that we weren't dressed for).
Today we wound up with a late start, which nobody complained about because we all managed nice warm showers. We met two more Jewish kids (putting me further in the minority!) and went to breakfast at a carousel pavillion that had been reconditioned as a pancake house and had these big, almost rubbery Dutch pancakes. They were wonderful with this really thick sugar syrup that tasted like caramel, and almost malty. Then we wandered back to the hostel and packed up our laundry to bring to a laundromat. We discovered that the laundromat offered a laundry service (by the pound of clothes!) so for ~6 Euros, we had our laundry washed, dried, and folded for us while we enjoyed the Heineken brewery tour right around the corner. On the way in, we were offered a flier with a 20% discount for admission, which we gladly took. So for 12 Euros we managed an interesting tour as well as three free beers.
While waiting for our laundry to be done at 5:30 we found a great open air market (where I was advised by a police officer to put my camera in a bag to avoid a grab-and-run thief). Marc didn't get anything, Michael got chorizo and cheese, and I got cheese that looked like Havarti but was described by the owner as "medium." Yum! Then we walked back to the laundromat, near which Marc got a burrito and I got a big loaf of delicious bread for 1 Euro (Michael later decided to follow suit and the price was raised to 1.30 Euro. He should've haggled).
We picked up our laundry and chatted for a while with the folks in the cleaners about our trip- everyone is so friendly here- before heading back to the hostel, where we talked with some other folks in the room and ate our food, with plenty left for later.
The weather's due to warm up tomorrow. Hopefully it will! In the meantime, here's a bunch of photos:
NOTE: Due to issues either with the computer or the connection here (can't be sure yet), uploading photos is nearly impossible. Stay tuned.
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