Komm, wir fahren nach Amsterdam

So last week someone decided to go to Amsterdam. It sort of became a group thing with eight of us going total. We left Thursday evening and stayed till Saturday afternoon. The idea was to go to the city without really having specific plans and to just experience the place. That was done.
Amsterdam is known for two things in most of the rest of the world: the coffee shops and the red light district. Red light district is fairly widely understood, but the coffee shops perhaps not. If you want to drink coffee in Amsterdam you don't go to a coffee shop, you go to a cafe. Coffee shops sell coffee, but their main attraction is the weed. This means that many places in the city smell very strongly of such stuff. There are coffee shops all over, including two doors down from our hostel.
Enough of that though. I'm going to talk a little about what we did and then let Jake fill in more details as he wants. We got to Amsterdam at 9:30 or so I believe. It was after dark. Nobody seemed to have a very good idea of where the hostel was, but there were maps outside the train station. The people there are very nice, and while we were looking at the map, some guy from the US stopped and asked if we needed help. About ten minutes after we started walking, I noticed a guy up ahead of us that had just walked out of an alley. This wouldn't be too concerning except that he was not only very disreputable looking, but he started watching us and, once we passed him, started following us. My host family had told me a lot about how Amsterdam has very good criminals, so I watched him very closely the whole time. He followed us for a while, doing a pretty good job at it I think. He was certainly experienced enough to know what he was doing. Luckily, once we turned onto a side street he detached himself and we never saw him again.
The rest of the trip was significantly less nerve-wracking. The hostel was hard to find because it was just a not-well-marked door between a restaurant and a bar.

Our Hostel. I think we were all expecting it to actually have a sign marking it.

 It was very nice for the price considering breakfast was included. The next day, the others wanted to go to the Van Gogh museum. I thought this sounded interesting until I heard it costed €14. That was the end of my interest there. Fortunately, Jake felt similarly, so we went to the city Canal House museum. It is a canal house that was donated to the city in the late 19th century by a very rich family to be a museum. It was pretty cool and much cheaper.

The garden outside the canal house.

 After that we had a lot of time before the planned meeting time, so we wandered around Amsterdam. One of our finds was a really neat cheese shop. It had lots of samples of Dutch cheese (very good), so we ate many of those.

The cheese shop. Pretty neat, pretty yummy.

 We wandered a little bit more and, near the harbor, found this:

A playground on a barge. It was very enjoyable.

That night we went to a bar cause that's what everyone else likes to do. It was pretty boring. They eventually decided to go find another place. We ended up at the place right next to our hostel, which is extremely loud and dancy, so I went and showered. I happened to come back just as they were planning on leaving for a coffee shop. Neither Jake nor I wanted to go to one of those, so we wandered the city some more. That is a very enjoyable thing in the dark.
The next day, we checked out of the hostel and went to a market. It was pretty cool and had lots of cheese and spices. Then we went to a little park (actually the largest on the map). It was kind of nice and was a neat juxtaposition between nature and city. However, the paths were paved and wider than many two-way roads, so it was kind of over-developed I though.

From the park, I'm not sure what this is exactly, but it has the three red x's. Those have apparently been a kind of symbol for Amsterdam for centuries.

After the park, we went to eat. Nick, Jake, Kirk, and I ended up at one of the ubiquitous 5-euro Italian restaurants. It was actually pretty good. When the others decided to go see the red-light district, the same group decided to go to the Amsterdam museum to get a bit of history. We ran out of time there, but it was interesting. After that, we met at the train station to go home. Neat neat.

Bis später,
Marcus