It’s about 5pm on Sunday in Amsterdam. I did manage to sleep last night, and pretty well. I woke up when my bunk mate came in around 4amish.
Yea, I am totally sleeping in a bunk bed. Did I tell you that before? I was last in the room, so I’m on top. Isn’t that fun? I was like 5 last time I slept in a bunk bed.
Had the hostel’s free breakfast this morning when I finally crawled out of bed around 9:30am. Not bad, really. Toast, ham, cereal, apple juice and some kind of sweet bread.
After that I headed over the Rijksmuseum to try to get an early start on that. The Rijksmuseum is where many classic masterpieces are. Lots of Rembrandt. The line was pretty long so I decided to be sneaky and head to the tourism office where I knew I could get an advance ticket and skip the line. That kind of backfired. The line at the tourism office was longer 🙂
So instead I decided to rent a bike and try to get out of Amsterdam and see the countryside. Granny bike rented I picked a direction (West) and pedaled my ass off. I rode probably 10 miles or so before giving up and turning around. Never got away from civilization.
Once I got back to town I hit the Heineken brewery and did the Heineken Experience, which is their tour. My advice? If you want to get drunk for EU 10, take it. If you care about seeing their brewery, don’t bother. You don’t actually get to see any part of the working brewery. Just mockups. Still, you get 3 beers for EU 10, and for whatever reason I got 5 instead of 3. I met a couple from Austrailia and chatted with them for a while, and a guy from Canada who works for NATO at The Haage (The Hay-ge, not The Hog, I learned). He was able to answer some of the questions I’d come up with and it was a nice chat. He recommended hopping a train if I want to see some countryside.
While pedaling back to the inner city I saw a sign for The Vondelpark and decided to check it out. I’d seen it on my map over and over. It’s a *huge* park right in the middle of the city. I took a nice bike ride through there and discovered something awesome. Amsterdam DOES have fat people! They make them all run in The Vondelpark until they are thin enough to be seen in public. That’s okay though, cause The Vondelpark is also where everyone sunbathes. Nude. Pretty good incentive to lose weight.
I finally ended up at the touist information booth again with no line and picked up an advance ticket for The Rijksmuseum for tomorrow morning, so that’s bright and early. Not sure how I am gonna handle that. I gotta check out of my hostel by 10am so I’ll have my backpack with me. I’m supposed to return my bike at the station at 10:45 so I’m going to see if I can find a locker at the station to put my pack in while I spend my last day in Amsterdam.
Biking is definitely the way to go. I got to see a lot more of the city today in quite a bit less of the time. There are bike paths everywhere, although sometimes they are hard to see and the traffic patterns are hard to follow. On a bike sometimes you are a tram, and sometimes a car, and sometimes a pedestrian and usually a bike. You also have your own set of stoplights.
What else? Someone threw a water balloon at me from a balcony while I was riding past and some lady in the street yelled at them. Probably her kid. They missed me. I also spent like 30 minutes pissed off this morning cause I thought someone stole my toothpaste. Of all things. I have like $3000 (EU 7.50) worth of electronics in my backpack and they steal my toothpaste! Turns out it was stuck behind a panel of my bathroom back. Woops. Glad I didn’t start making accusations 🙂
That’s all for now. I have a “Got drunk at noon and didn’t keep drinking” headache so I’m gonna take a nap so I can be ready to get drunk again this evening. There’s a pub crawl/party thing going on and I might join that. The nice thing about my hostel is that it’s out of the way, so it’s clean and pretty quiet. The bad part is that it’s dead. From what I understand, if you are travelling alone, your hostel bar is a good palce to meet people to hang out with. My hostel bar last night was me and one group of guys playing darts.
There’s more pics on Flickr. Check em out.
Oh man, you’re lucky you haven’t had to eat Dutch food. I spent about a week in the Netherlands a couple years ago and almost died, since I was a vegetarian at the time.
If you can, go to the “real” Netherlands, which means going about an hour minimum outside of Amsterdam. Find a nice little restaurant where the English is crappy at best, and try to find something edible. You end up eating pancakes for a week. Trust me.
I hope you’re having a blast! <3