was actually a childhood friend of mine from when I used to live in Southington, CT. He lived down the street from me and after I moved away in the third grade, I never heard from him or talked to him again. Then about a decade later I was at a friend's apartment and overheard someone mention Southington. I interjected that I used to live there, and wouldn't you know, it was my old childhood friend from down the street, and so we quickly became friends again. Anyways, I thought it was a neat story. On to the pictures, if you haven't seen Galway yet, scroll down.
Bikes are THE method of transportation in Amsterdam. They're literally everywhere, and there's even bike "parking" as you can see here. You have to pay close attention to where you're going to avoid getting hit by one. Luckily, we had a collision-free trip, but there were certainly a few close calls.
There's lovely central station. Sorry about the guy's head, I didn't realize it was in the picture until I got home and uploaded it to my computer
Here's the outside of our hostel. Looks kinda small and sketchy, huh? That backpack you see is Cosgrove walking in.
But then, here's the inside! It was a really cool hangout place, we came back here most nights and hung out with random people after everything else had closed, and they also serve free breakfast here in the morning. It was voted one of the top 3 hostels in Amsterdam - so even though it might look a little sketchy on the outside, it was actually a really nice place to stay. Sorry about the blurry picture, low light conditions!
This is where we would have stayed if we had money to blow.
I took this picture before I knew what the building was. We were later told by a local that this was the "old church". Apparently there's also a "new church" (probably Nieuw Kerk, and old church would be Oude Kerk if my dutch is right. which it probably isn't). We never actually found new church. You can see the construction going on in the foreground, there was tons of this all over the city. Devon made the joke that the Netherlands' national bird is the construction crane.
From what we gathered, this is some sort of famous playhouse, although I can't tell you why or what it's called. I took the picture figuring that maybe one day I'd find out.
Nothing of importance to point out here, these are just a few shots of the scenery walking around Amsterdam. The city is literally just tons of bridges and canals. I was told that Amsterdam is composed of 70 islands, more than 50 miles of canals, and over 1000 bridges. The discovery channel has been assuring me for years that the Dutch are excellent engineers, I guess it's a longstanding tradition...
This is what the buildings in Amsterdam are like. They're squished right up next to each other, with no alleyways in between (like every rule, there are exceptions, but generally speaking). As a result of this cramped style, the buildings have a "front" but most of them have no real sides, they just blend into each other. Some of them have settled like this one and leaned forward or backwards, so you can sort of see the faux front they've tacked on. Maybe I was a bit too quick with that "great engineers" comment...
That's looking down into the famed redlight district. If you look closely (maybe click to see a larger version of the picture), you can see the red lights down on the left side of the canal. That's as close as I dared to get when taking a picture of the redlight district - rumor has it that there are bouncers walking around who don't like pictures being taken, and won't hesitate to snatch your camera from you and toss it into the canal.
This is the Royal Palace in Dam Square. It's where the kings used to hang out, but now it's mostly just used for ceremonial purposes and entertaining foreign dignitaries. They run tours and we were going to go in it, but on the day we tried, there was something going on in there and it was closed to the public. I had the same problem with Buckingham Palace in London.
This is just looking down a random street. This was at the edge of the "shopping district" (or so I've chosen to deem it). If you walk deeper into this so-called shopping district, it becomes packed - literally difficult to walk in some of the narrower corridors.
I'd like to direct your attention in this picture to that big, teal-ish colored thing on the right hand side of the photo. Doesn't that look like a giant freight boat coming in? We had all thought it was a huge shipping frigate that was docked, and so I took this picture thinking it would be cool to capture that in the background of some of the scenery. We later found out when we got closer that this wasn't a boat at all, that's the edge of a science museum (called NEMO). In my defense, the science museum was actually made to look like a giant boat, so I'm not completely retarded.
This is a picture of your standard coffeeshop, these things were scattered around everywhere. Unfortunately, they don't allow pictures inside... which seems to be the norm for Amsterdam actually. It's a very unfriendly place to photographers. No pictures in the redlight district, in coffeeshops, or inside of any museum / historic building (in the name of preservation).
This coffeeshop was called the "Pink Floyd". A Floyd fan would recognize that Umma Gumma sign above the door - it's the name of one of their earlier albums. Every other album that they play in here is by Pink Floyd. Pretty cool idea for a coffeeshop if you ask me. Too bad I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside, it was actually really neat. The walls, ceilings, and floor were all painted and there were plasmascreen TV's all over the place. The channel they were set to when we were there was showing reruns of the recent F1 racing season, so needless to say I was happy with the programming.
These were taken outside of the Anne Frank house. Devon and I had been here before, but our two friends from back home hadn't and wanted to go. It's really nothing much to look at from the outside, if it weren't for the lines and signs, it would look just like any other building in any other place in Amsterdam. Looking at that first picture - the Anne Frank house is the one with black doors, between the candy-cane awning and the steps.
You weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but I tried to discretely snap this one anyways. I had to do it quickly, so that's going to be my scapegoat for how horrible it turned out. This is actually the bookcase that hid the secret passage to the Frank family's hiding place. You'd expect the hiding place to be sort of like an attic, but it was actually nicely furnished and looked like any other part of the house (i.e. painted walls, separate rooms, etc.).
This is outside of the Van Gogh museum. I'm not really one for Van Gogh, but everyone else wanted to go so I tagged along. Admittedly, it was pretty cool even though I'm not a fan of the guy. It wasn't just Van Gogh, they had a bunch of his paintings and even more of his unfinished sketches, but there were tons of other artists featured in here as well.
Again, you couldn't take pictures inside, but being the rule-breaking bastard I am, I snagged this one. All of his paintings look kind of like an 8 year old's watercolorings to me. Everyone says, "oh - but it's about his use of color!". I don't get it. Good thing I'm not an art major, I guess. I had a minor epiphany for about 30 seconds and sort of understood why everyone liked Van Gogh while I was there... but then I lost it and returned to my previous mentality of, "No, this guy sucks. I'd rather look at a Rembrandt." That said, it was still cool in there. And they had a Rembrandt, so wish granted for me.
I saw these guys as I was heading to the train station to return to the airport and leave, and snapped the picture. Speaking of the picture, sorry for the blurriness. I had to pull my camera out of my backpack and they were going at a pretty speedy trot, so I didn't have time to adjust the settings and take a better one. Anyways, five minutes later a humongous line of what appeared to be highschool students walked by me. I didn't put two and two together at the time, I figured the police were just on a drill or patrolling or something, and I figured that the students had just gotten out of school or were going on a field trip or something of the sort. It turns out that the Dutch just passed some legislation that changed the school hours, and the students were rioting. Not like smashing and looting, it was peaceful protest, but the police were around to make it stayed that way. Supposively a few trains were delayed because huge groups of students were standing on the tracks to stop them as part of the protest, but mine had no troubles - I made it to the airport safe and sound, and more importantly, on time.
So there's Amsterdam round 2 - with more pictures as promised. I'm off to Rome, Italy tomorrow - and will try to get pictures of that up before I go home. I also intend to take pictures of my student residence and a sort of "day in the life" before I go home - showing you guys where I work and my walk through Dublin everyday. So stay tuned.
