Amsterdam

All right. At the Amsterdam Schipol Airport and I have a little bit of free Internet, so let's finish my Amsterdam post. By the time that we had checked into both the hotel and hostel, we were exhausted from the morning and also very hungry. Thus, a trip to find food was in order. Coming from France and Belgium, we'd had our share of fries, so we wanted something different. Went to Wok to Walk, which is a chain of restaurants in Amsterdam that does quick to go Asian noodles. Yum.

The location we happened to be at was on the out skirts of the red light district. This was convenient for touring purposes. Mia and I purposely did not inform anyone else that we were walking around in the red light district, which came to a shock to everyone when they looked up to see scantily clad prostitutes staring back at them from the window.

After some souvenir shopping, we decided to take a canal cruise, which gave us a good overview of the city. Because the boat was covered due to rain, we were really unable to see too much, but it was still fun and got us around the city a lot faster than we would have been able to see while walking. It was also a nice opportunity to see the multitude of house boats that line Amsterdam's canals.

The canal tour lasted an hour and by then, we were hungry again. Got food and sent everyone else off to the train station. Mia, Chris and I contemplated doing additional sight seeing. We wanted to go to the Vodka Museum and running off the assumption that it was free, raced to the museum. Turns out it wasn't. I don't know why we thought it would be free, especially because entrance to the museum comes with a free shot of vodka. If it were free, there is no way that you'd get me to drink whatever vodka they were giving away. Probably laced with something sketchy.

In any case, when we found out that entrance to the museum was actually a bit expensive, our desire to go kind of fizzled. Instead, we walked around downtown for a while.

The other major thing we did was buy this soft drink that we got last time we were in Amsterdam. We had this drink after Andrew had locked us into our room for over an hour while he got ready and then enjoyed the complimentary breakfast. By the time he unlocked the door, breakfast was over, it was almost noon and we were starving. Mia and I got this soda called Fernandes and when we had it, it was the best thing  we'd had. Since then, it's been this mythical soda that we talked about. We got it again in Amsterdam and, as it turns out, it was not nearly as good as we remembered. It was okay, but not really great. I think it might have been because we had a sugar free version? Or maybe we were just hungry, thirsty and delirious the first time we had it. We'll never know.

I don't think Chris enjoyed his hostelling experience, by the way. He's stuck at another one tonight, but everyone around was loud and we were in bunk beds next to some woman who kept on staring at me while I was trying to sleep. Weirdddd...

We woke up pretty early this morning so we could pack up our stuff, check out, put our bag in a luggage at the train station and meet Umma, James and Jimmy as they came back from their hotel. We ended up with an extra forty-five minutes, so we decided to try out Dutch pancakes. Why haven't I tried these before? Mia and I split a bacon and cheese one. Soo good. It was kind of crepe-ish, but everything was cooked into the batter. So good.

We met everyone at the train station and ended up not having as much time as we initially expected if we wanted to make it here to the airport in time. Thus, we took a bus over to the area of Amsterdam that holds all of the major art museums and went to the Van Gogh Museum. This ended up taking a lot more time than we thought, not because of the art museum itself, but because the computers at the ticket office were broken for like an hour.

The museum itself was good, but due to a Dr. Who episode about Vincent van Gogh, we (specifically me) made a lot of references to The Doctor and Amy Pond. Bad British accents happened and probably offended any nearby British tourists. It's a fun museum. It doesn't have some of his most famous paintings like Starry Night, but it has a lot of great ones. Also, I never realized how much he was influenced by Japanese art work until today. Pretty interesting.

We were supposed to also see the Albert Cuyp market, which is this large and multicultural market in the city. Unfortunately because of computer malfuncitons and planes, we couldn't. Maybe another time. The next few hours were spent training to the airport to the bus to the hotel to get our bags and bus back to the hotel and get through airport security. Oh and eat lunch.

Plane's about to board, so we'll meet you next in Copenhagen.