Day 4- Amsterdam

Yes, we’re still in Amsterdam.

The following day, we woke up, took our showers, were late for breakfast, checked out, secured our bags by placing them on a large shelving unit in the hostel and looked for a breakfast that was still being served.

There is something distinctly pleasant about sitting at a table located on a busy sidewalk while eating breakfast. People watching over eggs and coffee would be a great way to kick off a day no matter what city you may be in. Some of the enjoyment can be tempered, however, when the proprietor of the restaurant is doing his absolute best to turn his place into a tourist trap. These guys are irritating while walking by them, but it is somewhat interesting to observe this guy in action for longer than the time necessary for passing by while not making eye contact. Now imagine having to eat a meal near some idiot as he peddles meals to anybody who looked like a foreigner, though I have to say he probably could shoot randomly and only miss about half the time.

After a breakfast and head clearing session involving coffee and several waters, we took a boat tour of Amsterdam.

It has occurred to me that attempting to relate sights of Amsterdam to you is actually damn near impossible. However hard I try, there simply isn’t much I can usefully describe. In a written description of a city, there is little that does the justice a picture can. I could attempt to describe the rowhouses lining the canals as bicyclists went on kamikaze missions between a variety of cars that were smaller than a riding lawnmower (I dare you to think that is hyperbole), but imagination will inevitably picture something decidedly different than the actual scenes. Suffice to say, we visited the Anne Frank House (depressing, honest and fascinating) and the Amsterdam flea market (containing the usual sorts of things you would expect from a flea market: hippie merchandise, brand new tools, old and rusting tools, military surplus and great swaths of sidewalk space devoted to "miscellaneous"). We saw the outside of the Rijksmuseum, which contained an enormous collection including a very large number of Rembrandts’; there would not have been sufficient time to see much of the museum, so we didn’t. There were also a maritime museum (closed by the time we got there) and a large ship-shaped structure we originally figured to be the maritime museum that turned out to be something else entirely. It looked pretty cool though. Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of that, so you will have to use your imagination, thus defeating the point I made earlier this paragraph.

A boat tour is a pretty handy way of seeing Amsterdam, what with all the canals and the fact a great deal of the city is below sea level. Dikes, dams and canals probably have a lot more to do with the map of The Netherlands than every war the country has ever fought.

Either way, after a long, meandering walk for a meal, which, incidentally, ended at a very Americanized / Canadianized / Britishized place selling "Bad Food and Warm Beer". The name is not important for our story, mostly because none of us remember it. Troy thinks it is like a clown’s name, Mr. Bozo’s or something like that. Regardless, our sole experience with Dutch cuisine was pretty depressing, so what the hell. Though as far as I could tell, deep fried chicken gravy was the only distinctively Dutch food ever invented, since everyplace sold them. You could have a McKroket sandwich at McDonald’s, for goodness sake, so it doesn’t nearly have the purity of an unexploited, noncommercial quality like, say, wooden shoes.

After fooding up, we headed to the train station with the same goal as most the world for a heck of a lot of the first half of this century: Berlin!