When we got into Amsterdam we were greeted with, well trash. Lots and lots of trash. The garbage people were on strike because of low wages, so trash was just left on the streets. It also took us a while to figure out how to get to the house we were staying at. When we finally did figure it out it was about 15 minutes outside of the city on the tram which was a bit farther than we thought it would be.
We started off on the wrong foot with this city, and never really got on it's good side. The next day we went out to explore the city, and Maartje (the lady who rented out the house to us) left us her bike so that we could bike into the city. She told us where a bike rental place was so we could have two bikes. There was a little spot on the back of the bike that I could fit on, not very comfortably but it worked, so we biked to the rental place and picked out a bike. It ended up being the wrong size for Seth, so after having it about 1 minute we took it back and the guy wouldn't give us our money back. We biked into the city that way, with me riding on the back. And while it was cute, it was uncomfortable and we got lost a lot (good thing we had a gps).
We only went into the city about 5 times. Part of the problem with going through craigslist to find all of the places we would stay is that it didn't make it very flexible for the amount of time we'd stay in one place. Maartje was renting out her place for 3 weeks, so we took it. 3 weeks was way too long to stay in Amsterdam, you can do that city in about 2 days.
The highlight of our stay here was the day trips we took, which I will post about later. But other than that, we went to the Anne Frank museum, which was interesting if not totally depressing. We went to the Van Gogh museum which was pretty great. And the torture museum was pretty sweet. We didn't eat a lot of good food, and we met a lot of really rude people. Dutch people made the French look like sweethearts. Also, we shopped a lot, this is definitely the best thing about Amsterdam, so many cute stores. We kept running into them. So, mostly we just stayed in our house. I also got pretty sick for a few days. Amsterdam was the low point of our trip, we just didn't like it. I didn't like the feel of the city. We don't smoke, and we weren't interested in prostitutes, and Amsterdam plays to that for their tourists a lot. It got old pretty quick (all the gift shops had sex/drug mugs and shirts, stupid stuff like that).
I didn't really even get any good pictures, but we did take some. I'll say this about the city, it is really cute, and even when you go outside of the city, it's still really pretty. There was a lot of nice scenery, just not our favorite place.
On the train:
Is Seth really sleeping? You will never know.
European Coke = better than American Coke
The Train station in Amsterdam:
Photo shoot by one of many canals:
One of the few pictures of us together, some girl offered to take our photo, wasn't that nice?
This is what happens when we try to take pictures of us on our own.
Trash.
Wierdness.
This shop was closed when we passed it, unfortunately
Torture museum:
This was even creepier due to the fact that Seth and I were the only ones in the museum when we went.
