Amsterdam was a mixed bag for me. I was already in love with Haarlem, you see.
My first bit of time there was spent walking around and trying not to die by bike accident. I loooved the canals, but the main streets, with shops and tourist attractions, were so crowded with tourists and unbelievably busy. I actually felt claustrophobic. There are just so many people! The tall narrow buildings also kind of add to the feel.
My second morning there was beautiful. I found the Jordaan district that everyone in Amsterdam wants to live in. It's trendy and has cute organic cafes and local designers. It's really leafy and great to just sit and people watch. I had lunch on the second story of a very narrow cafe. Because it was so narrow I got to know the girls sitting beside me really well, really quickly. They were Irish and had amazingly good gossip about people I'll never know!
I went to slightly eclectic museums in Amsterdam, and the first of these was the Canal Museum. It was so cool to learn about why they had canals, how they planned the city around them and how they actually build on water. Every house has thousands of wooden poles drilled about twenty feet underwater into the ground to support the weight of the buildings (essentially, the entire Netherlands is clay, not soil). They use cement now, but all the original houses are on wooden poles. Wood underwater will be preserved, but as soon as it is exposed to oxygen it will start to rot. So they have to be very careful to make sure the water level in Amsterdam stays high enough to prevent the wood from rotting and the houses from caving in! Cool! Also, most of the houses in Amsterdam are at weird angles, this isn't because they are falling, although it really does look like it (sometimes it was like being in a fun house, where all the proportions are off), but because the houses are too narrow to carry large things up the stairs. The houses all have poles out front under the roof, where a rope can be tied and big, heavy things like furniture can be hoisted up through the windows. The weird angle allows for people to lift things without smashing them into the side of the house! So clever, those Dutch!
Then I headed over to a Houseboat museum! You can actually tour inside a useable houseboat. They are so much bigger than you'd expect! Not that it's really my ideal living space. And they're also pretty expensive, what with renting the docking space and upkeep. So I'm not sure why anyone would take that over an ordinary house.
I skipped the Anne Frank museum because tickets were sold out for two months ahead and the line was at least a 3 hour wait. I took a photo of the real house though! (the museum is actually in a house a door over that was recreated, because the real Frank house has had so many tours that the floors are falling in. I did, however, stop into the Tulip museum and learn all about the tulip industry and how tulips were so popular and overvalued that they actually crashed the stock market at one time. There are Dutch folk songs about it. Kind of like our Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
I also saw the Begeijnhof, which is a gorgeous hof formerly for women who wanted to be nuns but did not want to make vows to the Catholic church. The hof houses a chapel and a church and is amazingly beautiful with overgrown gardens and the whitewwashed houses. It's partly sectioned off because it is still residential, and even today they only rent to women.
I visited the floating flowermarket, which I thought would be lots of flowers for sale, but it's only bulbs right now, and they don't make for the most exciting photos. I also visited the Dutch Resistance Museum and learned about how the Dutch tried to resist the Nazi's before WW2 and how they kind of destroyed Indonesia. Pretty depressing museum, to be honest.
After buying new shoes because my feet were in so much pain from walking, and I had a week still ahead of me, I then headed to the Van Gogh museum, where I had an embarrassingly long coughing fit. Those should have been enough warning, but I went after that to a canal tour through the city. It rained and the boat fogged up so you could hardly see out the window. But the worst part was, by the end of the hour long tour my sinuses were hurting so badly I thought my teeth were going to fall out. I bought some meds (an dental floss in case it wasn't my sinuses and I reeeally had a problem) got the train back to Haarlem, and intended to crawl into bed and remain in denial about what was definitely becoming bronchitis, only to find that the hostel staff had decorated my bunk for my birthday! It was so sweet and all of my new roomies were waiting in the reception to chat altogether! Ahhh those times when being anti-social is soo tempting.
I actually spent two days in Amsterdam, but I cannot differentiate the two anymore. For some reason in my memory they take place altogether. Unfortunately, I realized too late, that I actually forgot to see a lot of what I wanted to. Which just means I have to go back!
My first bit of time there was spent walking around and trying not to die by bike accident. I loooved the canals, but the main streets, with shops and tourist attractions, were so crowded with tourists and unbelievably busy. I actually felt claustrophobic. There are just so many people! The tall narrow buildings also kind of add to the feel.
My second morning there was beautiful. I found the Jordaan district that everyone in Amsterdam wants to live in. It's trendy and has cute organic cafes and local designers. It's really leafy and great to just sit and people watch. I had lunch on the second story of a very narrow cafe. Because it was so narrow I got to know the girls sitting beside me really well, really quickly. They were Irish and had amazingly good gossip about people I'll never know!
I went to slightly eclectic museums in Amsterdam, and the first of these was the Canal Museum. It was so cool to learn about why they had canals, how they planned the city around them and how they actually build on water. Every house has thousands of wooden poles drilled about twenty feet underwater into the ground to support the weight of the buildings (essentially, the entire Netherlands is clay, not soil). They use cement now, but all the original houses are on wooden poles. Wood underwater will be preserved, but as soon as it is exposed to oxygen it will start to rot. So they have to be very careful to make sure the water level in Amsterdam stays high enough to prevent the wood from rotting and the houses from caving in! Cool! Also, most of the houses in Amsterdam are at weird angles, this isn't because they are falling, although it really does look like it (sometimes it was like being in a fun house, where all the proportions are off), but because the houses are too narrow to carry large things up the stairs. The houses all have poles out front under the roof, where a rope can be tied and big, heavy things like furniture can be hoisted up through the windows. The weird angle allows for people to lift things without smashing them into the side of the house! So clever, those Dutch!
Then I headed over to a Houseboat museum! You can actually tour inside a useable houseboat. They are so much bigger than you'd expect! Not that it's really my ideal living space. And they're also pretty expensive, what with renting the docking space and upkeep. So I'm not sure why anyone would take that over an ordinary house.
I skipped the Anne Frank museum because tickets were sold out for two months ahead and the line was at least a 3 hour wait. I took a photo of the real house though! (the museum is actually in a house a door over that was recreated, because the real Frank house has had so many tours that the floors are falling in. I did, however, stop into the Tulip museum and learn all about the tulip industry and how tulips were so popular and overvalued that they actually crashed the stock market at one time. There are Dutch folk songs about it. Kind of like our Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
I also saw the Begeijnhof, which is a gorgeous hof formerly for women who wanted to be nuns but did not want to make vows to the Catholic church. The hof houses a chapel and a church and is amazingly beautiful with overgrown gardens and the whitewwashed houses. It's partly sectioned off because it is still residential, and even today they only rent to women.
I visited the floating flowermarket, which I thought would be lots of flowers for sale, but it's only bulbs right now, and they don't make for the most exciting photos. I also visited the Dutch Resistance Museum and learned about how the Dutch tried to resist the Nazi's before WW2 and how they kind of destroyed Indonesia. Pretty depressing museum, to be honest.
After buying new shoes because my feet were in so much pain from walking, and I had a week still ahead of me, I then headed to the Van Gogh museum, where I had an embarrassingly long coughing fit. Those should have been enough warning, but I went after that to a canal tour through the city. It rained and the boat fogged up so you could hardly see out the window. But the worst part was, by the end of the hour long tour my sinuses were hurting so badly I thought my teeth were going to fall out. I bought some meds (an dental floss in case it wasn't my sinuses and I reeeally had a problem) got the train back to Haarlem, and intended to crawl into bed and remain in denial about what was definitely becoming bronchitis, only to find that the hostel staff had decorated my bunk for my birthday! It was so sweet and all of my new roomies were waiting in the reception to chat altogether! Ahhh those times when being anti-social is soo tempting.
I actually spent two days in Amsterdam, but I cannot differentiate the two anymore. For some reason in my memory they take place altogether. Unfortunately, I realized too late, that I actually forgot to see a lot of what I wanted to. Which just means I have to go back!