The Marathon: Amsterdam

We arrived in Amsterdam around 10pm, and the city was bustling. There were people everywhere. One of the things we noticed about Amsterdam, right from the start, was that there were more tourists than anything else. We could hardly tell who was a tourist and who wasn’t. It was a lot harder to get a feel for tourist culture vs. the local culture. I suppose with Amsterdam they’re too integrated to feel the difference.

We checked into our hostel, Hostel Cosmos, once we finally found it. It was off a couple side streets and had a small sign above the door. It was tiny little family run place with a couple rooms. There were four rooms on two floors with anywhere from 4-9 beds. For the first night we all stayed in the same four-person room and then the following night Jake had to stay in a 6 person room and the three girls stayed in a 9-person room. It was teeny tiny and super compact. The stairs were incredibly skinny and steep. They had some of the comfiest beds that we slept in but the bathroom felt like an airplane bathroom.

We just got some French fries and went to bed (exhausted after the travel to and from the airports, as well as the flight itself). There were French fry stands EVERYWHERE and they all had dozens of sauce options to chose from. We ended up eating way to many French fries this trip than necessary. Amsterdam, for obvious reasons, has a lot of munchie fast food style food stands. The most common were these French fry stands, and they were all so tasty and were steak cut style. For about 3€ Maya, Sona, and I would split a large French fry with ketchup.

We woke up decently early to take a free 3-hour walking tour of the city (aka tips based). Our tour guide was a cool Sweedish man who had gone to university in the states and moved to Amsterdam just over a year ago. He clearly loved this city. One of the first things he told us was “if you find yourself bored in Amsterdam, there is something wrong with YOU, not with Amsterdam.” The first question he asked us was “What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Amsterdam?” The most popular responses were “weed” and “prostitutes.” Just to play a devil’s advocate of sorts, someone said the architecture. The point of his tour was to give us a different view of the city, to teach us a little bit of the city’s history and the citizens values. He emphasized the city’s tolerance a lot, and expressed it through their allowance of weed (although illegal) as well as the February strike in favor of the Jewish community during WWII. He also talked to us about the “Dutch way of doing things.” The first example he gave of this was the odd structure of most of the buildings, they all leaned pretty far forward. The reason behind this was that because the city was on the water, all goods had to be stored in the attic instead of the basement, because of all the flooding. The staircases are all incredibly narrow, so they used to use a pulley system to pull the packages up to the attic from the front of the houses. In order to keep the packages from scraping the buildings, they built them to tilt. He said it would have been easier to just have the pulleys hang further out from the house, but such is the dutch way. The other example he gave took place right after the Netherlands became an officially protestant country, thereby making Catholicism illegal. One particular group of Catholics, about 400, continued to meet in a normal building. All of the Amsterdamers could hear the mass every Sunday, and reported it to the police. The officers said they don’t work on Sundays, so when they went to investigate on Monday, they never heard anything. This was the Dutch way, to tolerate the Catholicism, even though it was technically illegal. He said the Dutch really care for three things: discretion, if it doesn’t hurt anyone, and if its good for business. He applied this to the weed sale. Technically the sale of marijuana is illegal in Amsterdam, but as long as its discrete (all those establishments say “coffeeshop,” not advertising marijuana), it doesn’t hurt anyone (you can’t technically overdose on marijuana and die, like you can with alcohol), and its good for business (clearly, by all the tourists) they let it continue. The same thing applied to the Catholics, they were discrete, they weren’t hurting anyone, and persecuting the Catholic merchants would just drive away business.

Buddiest temple -1999

We ended the tour in an open plaza out front of a church. He told us how this was the church from which Anne Frank heard the bells every Sunday while hiding in the secret Annex. Here he told us how, once the non-Jews of Amsterdam hear about the deportations of the Jewish community, the people of Amsterdam organized a protest. During the February strike, thousands of Amsterdamers marched through the city protesting the treatment of the Jews. Trams and buses didn’t run and business stopped for days. Eventually the strike was crushed and the deportations increased in speed as a result, but it showed that the Amsterdamers at least stood up for their Jewish neighbors. The other interesting this in this square was the homomonument. It was dedicated to all the homosexuals who have been persecuted and discriminated against through history. It specifically focused on during the holocaust, as most monuments and memorials are dedicated specifically to the Jewish population and not the other groups who were targeted, like the Roma, gypsy, and homosexual populations. It was another example he gave of the city’s famous tolerance.

After his tour we stopped and got some food before paddle boating. We had no idea where the paddle boating rentals took place, so we crossed the city to Amsertdam Centraal station to find a rental locations. They then directed us to the other side of the city to their rental location. By the time that we found them, they had closed about 10 minutes earlier. After an hour and a half of walking, we ended our fruitless quest. All the walking did help me to appreciate the city. Amsterdam has the most canals of any European city (even Venice) and it made the city gorgeous. It always retained a lot of its old architecture. All the buildings were really tall and really skinny. It was definitely the most beautiful city we saw on this trip.

After our failed quest, we just went to a Pancake Bakery next to the Anne Frank Huis to get some famous Dutch pancakes. I got a delicious banana pancake that was huge and covered with cinnamon and powdered sugar. It was absolutely heavenly, I was so happy to eat it. During this whole trip, in each city, someone has been obsessed with trying a certain type of food. In Germany, all Sona wanted to do was try a sausage. In Denmark, all Jake wanted was a Danish. In Amsterdam, I wanted pancakes. Sure enough, first time we had a sit down meal, I dragged us across the city to a pancake place (we were headed to Anne Frank’s house anyways…).

Our next stop was the Anne Frank museum. At one time, the secret annex and the warehouse were going to be sold and demolished by a developer, but the people protested and the city bought the building and it’s neighbor. They preserved the building as it was and had her diary on display. Their living space was absolutely tiny and it was incredible that they all lived in the small annex for years. The museum part also told the stories of each of the habitants of the secret annex and their fates. Only Otto Frank (Anne’s father) survived the war, and he published Anne’s diary so that they world could know what it was like for a Jew during the war. Anne’s dream was to become a writer, and it’s a tragedy that only through her death did she become a famous published author. They never did discover who revealed their location to the secret police.

We ended up getting French fries for dinner (don’t judge) and then headed home. We just hang out for a little before going to sleep. We woke up early the next morning to head to the Van Gogh museum. When we got there, there was a huge line. We waited for almost an hour and a half, taking turns to run to bakeries or food stands for breakfast foods. When we got to the front we discovered it was 14€, which was ridiculous and there was no student discount. We had waited for so long and wanted to see Sunflowers, so we just ate the cost. The museum had around 200 of his works, as well as drawings and other things. They also had a temporary exhibition, called Picasso in Paris, and it was neat to see that too. Picasso and Van Gogh had been contemporaries, so it was nice to see their work together like that.

Then we went to the Heineken Experience, which was very similar to the Guinness factory in Dublin. There was a simulation where we were beer being made and there were lessons on how to properly pour the beer from a tap and drink it correctly. This was out last stop before we had to catch our train to Berlin. This train trip was an adventure in it’s own right…