Europe Part 5: Going down to Funkytown

We got dropped off at the train station and after a little guestimation we managed to get ourselves on the right trains to Amsterdam. There was a little bit of strangeness at a mid-station where we were inundated by announcements in four languages about trains arriving, departing, and delayed. Then there was some strangeness again when we arrived at Amsterdam and tried to figure out whether or not we needed to get tickets to our next location, St. Goar. The lines were long and service was confusing, so we decided to skip it and figure it out ourselves, later. ADVENTURE!

Amsterdam! How to describe it...it’s kind of like if you took the pretty parts of Paris and stacked them on top of the weird shops in Hollywood. Lots of souvenirs, bars, and little markets and food depositories. Kind of a weird place. It’s kind of a scary place for pedestrians, lots of strange lanes and trams, and all of the modes of transportation are silent: electric trams and bikes. So you’re always looking over your shoulder for silent threats. Nice city for walking around, though. There’s a lot of stuff to see. When we walked to the hotel they were hanging orange up everywhere. More about that later.


Amsterdam is like a mullet: classy up top, trashy on the ground level.

We took five at our hotel, near Rembrandt square, and then went back out a-walking. First stop, the sex museum. SEX! AAAH! It was a pretty eclectic little mix of artifacts. It was about 25% gaudy mannequins, 50% old porn, ranging from ancient statues to japanese silk screens to porn collections from the 20’s and 30’s. And another 25% modern art: paintings and the like. Oddly educational. Mostly odd.

More walking after that. Amsterdam is pretty endlessly fun to see. We wandered around some of the canals, mostly lined with the sort of nondescript but artistically constructed stone houses I’ve begun to associate with pretty much all of Europe. We found an area we dubbed ‘head shop alley’, full of coffee shops, head shops, and stoner souvenir shops. We nearly bought some cannabis flavoured (Ha! Europe!) chocolate, but passed. I can’t imagine it actually adds anything.

We actually walked through the red light district which was a *lot* smaller than I would have thought. Only 10 or 20 windows, not all of them occupied. Maybe there were some others that we didn’t see, but I was actually on the lookout for the Red Light visitors center. I’d heard that they had a brochure that answered a lot of common questions people had but alas, they were closed. Jess got a kick out of walking behind me and watching the ladies in the window as their faces changed from sultry, upon seeing me, to kinda confused, upon seeing her.



We had some lunch (dinner?) at a restaurant and people-watched for a while, and then started to head back. We passed by a flower market on the way and they had a tonne (Ha! Europe) of bulbs of all different colours (okay, I’ll stop). We had seen a lot of tulips in bloom in the fields on the way in, but they were selling everything under the sun out there.


Seriously, check out these bulbs!

We came back to the hotel for a bit to relax and write, and then made one more expedition out later to try some street food. We got some okay pizza and a waffle. We tried Burger King onion rings, too, which were not as crunchy as their American counterparts and, therefore, according to Jessie, not as good. We finished off with some ice cream and more people watching in Rembrandt square, and then back to the hotel to sleep. The bar underneath our hotel room kept playing loud music until far too late at night, but we slept through it eventually. having a shoulder to cuddle up to will do that to you.

-N