Amsterdam Day 3

My new friends let me borrow a bike for the day so I expect to see a lot more of the city. Unfortunately it’s raining. Given the facts that it’s raining, I plan on going to some museums today, and I’m on a bike, I think I will leave my backpack and big camera in the room and just take dad’s camera and the guide book.

 

After an art museum and the Van Gogh Museum, it’s official!!!! I am a Neanderthal. It seems, I have absolutely no idea what the difference is between the work of a master artist and a talented 10 year old. There were things I liked and things I didn’t. It seemed to the opposite of what the expert seems to be impressed with.

 

After the museums I rode the bike around the rest of the city I missed on my walk. Had lunch with a nice German couple, then continued my ride. Got back to my hotel around 5:30 ish soaking wet. Arranged to take the bike back and dry out. They invited me over for dinner. Leaving the hotel for dinner was a bit of a mess. I get down to the bike and realize I don’t have the bike light they let me borrow so I had to go up to the room. I get to the room and realize I don’t have my room key, It’s in the room. So I go back down to the desk and get a new key. Get back up to the room and decide that I don’t need the backpack or the guide book so I just grab the light and a small map instead. When I get maybe 2/3rds of the way there I realize that I wrote all the directions to his place in the guide book and that is back in my room. I figured I might as well take my best guess and see if I can find it. Well, no problem. I remembered the road and I just happened to see him standing more or less in the window as I rode by. They fixed me a great dinner, we had some wine, chatted a bit and by about 10 I headed home. Great end to my Amsterdam trip!!

Amsterdam Day 2

Beautiful weather day. First since I’ve been in Europe.

I’m writing this entry the day after because by the time I got home I was too worn out to do anything but get ready for bed. I think I walked 60% of every street in Amsterdam. I started by walking the park areas around here. Then I headed just north of the center of town. I passed the Ann Frank House so I stopped in for a look. It was interesting. I’ve seen this place on TV but it’s much more personal when you are standing in the rooms themselves. My reaction surprised me very much. I imagined most people was thinking “How horrible” and it was. But I kept thinking “I bet everyone in killing fields of Cambodia (or the camps for that matter) would trade places in a sec”. I guess being at the killing fields affected me more than I thought.

 

Anyway, enough of that. I had lunch next to a group of girls from the states. We swapped stories about Amsterdam and had a few laughs.

 

Next I headed to the navel museum. This took me though the major part of the center of town. Found it but unfortunately it was closed. From there I wanted to check out a traditional windmill. Unlike in America (where windmills were mostly used to do things like grinding grains), windmills are used to pump water. Over 50% of Amsterdam is under sea level. I found it interesting to check out the blades. When I look at their shape, I see a design way beyond their understanding of aerodynamics.

 

From there I just started walking the water ways. They are in concentric circle around the city. By the time a walked 2 of these all the way around and back, I was at the hotel and it was time to get ready for dinner. The same guy that drove me from Brussels to Amsterdam invited me to meet him and his girlfriend for dinner. While there we ran into another couple of friends of theirs so they joined us.

 

I had a great time hanging out with all of them. We started at a restaurant and then after a walk ended up at a whisky bar. By the time I made it back home it was almost 2am.

Day 1 of Amsterdam

After class was over I rode up to Amsterdam with 1 of the students that lives in Amsterdam. It was a little after 4 pm by the time we got to the hotel. I was told I needed to make sure I got a ticket for the trip home before they were sold out. So, first order of business was to head over to the station to pick up some tickets. The only thing I knew was the station was somewhere to the west on the other side of town. So I just started walking west. It wasn’t long before I saw a trolley with “Central Station” on it. I guessed that was where I needed to go so I started following the tracks. I lot easier than following a bus

Every time the tracks split I would ether follow the one going west, or wait for the next trolley that said “Central Station”. It wasn’t long before I found the station. After getting the ticket in hand, I went for a walk about. I didn’t really have any objective or plan. Just wanted to see where my feet led me. Found my way back to the hotel somewhere around 9 pm.

My first impressions of Amsterdam as not what I expected. I guess I expected a …. more seedy place. Other than the “café’s “ it’s just a nice, pretty, city with interesting architecture and a lot of water. At just about every turn you will see the lights reflecting of the water.

NATO

The international headquarters of NATO is on the drive from the hotel to the office. Just found it interesting so I snapped a picture.

Day trip to Brugge

Woke up today and could hardly walk. I must be getting old. 2 days of 8-10 hrs of walking and my legs are so stiff I walked like an old man for the first hr. Took a day trip to Brugge. The train system is a bit hard to make out. There is no way I would have found the right track if I hadn’t asked at the ticket counter. Once on the train things were pretty easy getting off at the right stop.

 

Very cool place. Coble stone roads, and old 17^th & 18^th century buildings (at least that’s my impression of them) water ways throughout the town. It rained all day, but not too hard so was not a real problem.

 

An interesting thing happened. Remember French is the dominate language, but they also speak Dutch. A girl came up to me and asked me if I speak Dutch. Turns out she is from Israel. She asked me where she could find the boat rides. It didn’t dawn on me until after I walked away. “How did I know she asked me if I could speak Dutch?” She must have been speaking English when she asked me if I spoke Dutch. An Israeli girl (in a French town) asked me if I spoke Dutch in English????????????? That would be like someone coming up to you in Cincinnati and in Japanese asking if you spoke German?

 

I actually used a map this time. I actually used 3 maps. They got progressively more close up. The big one showed the whole area including the out line areas. The smallest map just showed the down town area but in lots of detail. I would walk north for a while then all of a sudden I would show up on the east side of town. So I would back track and all of a sudden I would show up on the north edge of the map.

It took me half the day and getting lost 3 times before I realized the middle map was turned 80 deg from the others. The big one had north pointing up. The Middle one had west pointing up but there was no arrow on the map to show you where north was. Once I figured that out everything went smooth.

Day 2 Brussels

 

Started the day earlier that I expected, given the time a actually got to sleep and how tired I was. I was out of the room by 9am. Not bad for me

Had the day all planned out. 1, 2, 3, 4, … I didn’t even get to step 1 of my plan before I got side tracked. The whole day I was like a puppy in a flock of birds. Oh look at that, hey what’s that? What’s going on over there? … I seemed to chaise every shinny object and followed every strange noise. The funny thing is I think I ended up doing almost everything on my list. All in all, a very fun day.

 

I started by heading to a spot the overlooked the whole city. On the way some guy asked me if I wanted to take a city tour. For $25. I talked him down to $20 so I figured what the heck. When I got on the bus and looked at the stops it turned out stop 4 was where I was headed.

 

On the bus I was next to 2 girls from Ireland and 1 from Scotland. They were funny. We had a nice chat between sites. Between sites they played instrumentals of American songs. The girls knew the words to almost every song that came on. They took us to 14 different places, many of which were too far out for me to walk to so I think the tour turned out very well.

 

After the tour I got off the bus at my original step 1 of my plan. Hung out there for a bit then headed to step 2. On my way there I got side tracked by a skateboard park, then a church, then a shopping district, … By this time I had absolutely no idea where I was. It took me about 5 mins of walking around in circles before I figured out where I was. So I headed to step 2, again. Because of my detour I passed step 5 (Royal Palace) on my way to step 2, so I stopped there. From there I saw a big crowd so I went over to see what the hub bub was all about. Then a few more distractions and all of a sudden I found myself at another place I was planning on going to. The whole day was like this.

 

By about 4pm I stopped for lunch. A few more hours of people watching, While I was people watching I passed a district that had 4 cartoon books. That’s all they sold. Most of them had a table in the back were the authors were drawing something in the back for each person in line. I imagine that line went very very slow. I looked through the books. I found all different genres, for all different ages. Everything from Cave man, American Wild West, Sci Fi, Asian, Fantasy, Modern, Historical, and Adult and everything from little kids, to VERY adult (if you know what I mean).

 

By this time it was maybe 9pm. I stopped in to an English pub for dinner. Next to me were 2 couples from England and a football (soccer) game on the tv. If you ever spent time with folks from England while a game is on, it does not take long to make a friend. We watched the game together.

 

I was surprised that I didn’t get back to my room until like 10pm-ish.

 

Day one of Brussels:

Started Thursday in Cinci, got on a plane at about 3pm, landed in Brussels about 8am Friday morning. Already a long day.

I know it’s a very bad idea to sleep during the first day so I pushed to stay awake. I had to do some work but as soon as I was done I started to get ready to go out. I was already crashing so I thought I would try something new. I make a wake up call for 1 hour and I took a nap. 2 mins later (at least that’s how it felt) the phone rang to wake me up. I set up another wake up call for another 1 hour nap. Man it was tough getting up. I did manage this time.

 

I took a shower and headed out. Since I didn’t have any cash so I took a taxi to the down town area. Got some cash, paid the Driver and headed to some food. Small little local place. I met the 2 girls sitting next to me. They made a few suggestions for things to see. They finished and were replaced by 2 more girls. We chatted a bit and gave me a few other suggestions. After diner I went to the restroom. At the top of the stairs right in front of the bathrooms there was a big burly lady demanding 30 cents from everyone going in the rest room. If she had not just demanded money from the guy (local I’m guessing) in front of me would have figured she was just trying to con me. It seems this is a standard practice.

 

My goal for tonight was just to get the feel for the place. To that end I just headed in whatever direction my nose pointed to. In general I use the lemming method during the day and the moth method at night. The lemming method is to just head to the biggest crowd or follow the majority of pedestrians. The moth method is just follow the light. Head whatever direction is the brightest. It’s surprising how well this works.

 

It seems I look like I know what I’m doing when I’m completely lost. In 6 hours I had about 7 people come up to ask me where something was. The funniest part is rarely even knew where I was at the time.

 

I found a lot of very cool architecture. Most of the time it was dark. Some of the buildings were light up very well. Most of the building were lit up way too much. It looked just like day time, but with very little shadows. I’ll have to keep this in mind when I finish my backyard.

 

It seems I am way out of shape. I only walked around for about 6 hours, but my legs are killing me. Well, it’s 11:33 so I think I’ll head to bed.

 

 

 

How the other half lives

We left at about 9am. Got to the hotel by about 11:30. We ended up at the Hard Rock Hotel. I was a bit worried but it turned out great. They gave me a very high end room for the same price as a regular room $-) . I would definitely stay there again!!!

Coolest ride yet!

We started the day at 6am. The sun was not up yet but it was light out. We were headed out on what the book described as �SA ride for the more adventurous�. It started out on a nice wide road. Quickly went down to a narrow road, then gravel, then dirt, then dust, then it got rough!

Tour day

Today we hired a driver and a guide to take us through the temples.