Amsterdamned: A Slapdash Vacation Plan

I can tell you that in the airports and the train stations of western Europe, there is nothing nice being said about Iceland. It is, of course, hardly their fault that a volcano erupted, but it is wreaking havoc with spring break plans all over the place.

Our trip started out on Monday. We took the TGV up to Paris and dodged the RER closures to get to Draveil, which is a little town south of the city where our hostel was going to provide a free shuttle to Orly for our 10:30 a.m. flight the next day. We were nervous about the ash, but Orly had re-opened on Monday and was operating most of its flights. The only flights that weren't landing in Athens as scheduled were coming from France and Germany. This didn't bode well.

Tuesday morning, and we have received no cancellation e-mail from EasyJet, and the internet tells me that our flight status is still "on time". We walk to the train station, get on a bus to the airport, walk from the bus stop to the terminal. I realize I have full-sized shampoo in my bag and can't check a bag on EasyJet without paying a fee. So I throw it in the trash. And just then we realize that our flight is cancelled. Lame. Now we have no flight and I have no shampoo.

The EasyJet people tell us that it's okay, our flight is just delayed. And I have a momentary resurgence of hope before she adds "to next week". Great. Our flight is delayed to next week. How is that useful for anyone?

So far we're out the deposit for our Athens hostel and the cost of the plane tickets, which she claims will be reimbursed online (but judging from the EuroStar debacle, from which I still have not received a refund, who knows). We sit down, dejected, and contemplate another plan. Amy's number one objective was to see the Netherlands, and since my first attempt at tourism didn't accomplish many of the tourist-y goals (and since my camera was broken on my first trip), I agreed. We booked a train up north via our iPhones and hopped on the RER and various metros to get to Gare du Nord.

The first thing that happens is that Amy and I are seated nowhere near each other on the train. The second thing is that the train moves three feet and then stops. Forty-five minutes later they announce that there's a problem with the power car (so British of them to say) but that they've called the correct personnel and it'll be fixed soon. And then thirty-ish minutes after that they say, oops, nevermind, we can't fix it. We're going to send you over to another train, take your same seats, and we'll be on our way. We managed to trade seats with the woman who was sitting next to Amy and we eventually got to Amsterdam and found our hostel.

We got Thai food for dinner, after seriously contemplating Greek food (after all, we'd been so looking forward to lots of Greek food). And for the first time since I arrived in France, I was not disappointed by the (non-)spiciness of food. It was excellent. If only that restaurant were in Bordeaux, because I think Amsterdam is a little far to travel for delicious Thai.

I think the Dutch probably receive my award for "Friendliest People". Look momentarily confused and someone will step forward and ask if you need help. Everyone is just so nice and friendly even though their town is so crammed full of tourists all the time that they can hardly ride their bicycles without crushing one. And man, they ride bicycles a lot.

It was a really refreshing difference from being in France. In general, I love France, but people are undoubtedly more closed here. I'm constantly worried about whether I'm going to say something correctly or whether someone is going to judge my accent. Which happens. In Amsterdam, not only does everyone speak English, they don't at all resent having to speak it, or make you feel bad for not having learned Dutch. What a difference.

The streets are clean in Amsterdam. There are fewer cigarette butts and, best of all, the constant smell of human urine and piles of dog excrement were missing from the sidewalks. Part of this is from the pee screens they put in the corners on public streets, which are designed to deflect one's own urine back on one. Some of them used to be electrified, but aren't anymore.

On our first full day we took a three-hour walking tour of the city, which is situated on a bunch of canals but which doesn't reek like Venice does. Apparently their system of locks and dams flushes the water out periodically so that it doesn't get stagnant. The architecture is really interesting to me. Most of Bordeaux is made of the exact same stone and decorated in the exact same ways. It can get kind of boring. All the buildings in Amsterdam are varying widths, as they used to pay their taxes according to the width of the buildings on the canal front (you can see, in the photo on the right, the narrowest building in Amsterdam in red. It's less than 6 feet across). The stair cases are all steep enough that I feared broken bones every time I had to use one. There are lots of interesting shutters and embellishments on the faces of most of the buildings.

The most interesting part is probably that all the buildings lean forward, over the street, to varying degrees. They also all have hooks on wooden or steel beams at the top of the buildings. I wondered about this for a while. Apparently it's because, the city being below sealevel, the basements of all these houses used to flood quite regularly. And in order to keep from carrying the stores of grain or flour up the leg-breaking staircases I mentioned, they hauled them up to the attic with a pulley system, using the beams and hooks. When the wind blew, the bags of grain sometimes blew into the windows and broke them, so the buildings started to be built so that they leaned forward, to protect the windows. A weird problem-solving strategy, but one that gives the city a lot of character.

There are tulips all over the city. Photos of tulips. Tulip bulbs for sale. Flower beds with growing tulips. A few centuries ago there was speculation in tulips -- people were spending a fortune on tulip investments until the bubble burst and everyone went bankrupt. True story. And during World War II, when everyone was starving in the winter, they ate a paste made out of mashed tulip bulbs, though that's a little less amusing.

For dinner on Wednesday night we found a nice Indian restaurant down the street from our hostel. They were, inexplicably, using the menu covers of some cave in Bordeaux. On the inside cover was a map of the wine regions of Aquitaine. This was pretty cool, as I'd just been learning about Holland's role in the proliferation and trading of Bordeaux wines in the 17th and 18th centuries for a project in my history class. Later, we saw a Chateau Mouton-Rothschild poster in a Chinese restaurant in the Red Light District. I was nerding out a little bit.

We had a pretty quiet night indoors with some really obnoxious Canadian boys who were sharing our room. They'd taken their last year of high school off to go backpacking around Europe and were stoned every time I saw them. Which I guess is kind of understandable, for tourists in Amsterdam, but they were decidedly obnoxious.

The next day we did the Van Gogh museum. On the way we passed this giant "I amsterdam" sign. That's Amy under the left arch of the "m" but you can hardly see her.

The Van Gogh museum was, again, pretty awesome. They walk through Van Gogh's inspirations and teachers, then sort of chronologically through his work and personal life, and his trips in and out of the asylum, until they reach 1890, when he shot himself in the chest. They totally skip over the ear incident, which is still curious to me.

That evening we visited the Anne Frank house, which is that strangely modern building on the right (the front part has been remodeled and the upper floors left as they were in the 40s), and which was really cool. After the inhabitants were betrayed and deported, all of the furniture was taken out of the place, and Otto Frank asked that it be kept empty, like that. The result is that you walk through the empty rooms of the Opekta warehouse downstairs, then upstairs and into the secret annex. They have excerpts from Anne's diary and pieces of historical information. Lots of the house is still how it was -- the marks on the walls that measure the kids' growth between 1942 and 1944, photos of movie stars that Anne pasted to the wall, etc. They end with the fate of the inhabitants, and coming out of the building I was kind of surprised to emerge back into 2010. I bought a copy of The Diary of a Young Girl and read it on the train on the way home. I'd read it once as a child but hadn't really understood its significance. It was cool, on the re-read, to be able to picture more concretely what exactly the secret annex had looked like.

On Saturday we changed hostels. Having made our reservations late, we couldn't find anywhere that could take us for our whole trip. That afternoon, we had little planned, except for an early evening tour of the Red Light District. Our tour guide was really amusing and we walked around and learned about the history of the district and the various things that go on.

For instance, this flag which occurs strangely often in the city is the BDSM flag. Good to know, I suppose.

We walked pasted a museum called The Condomerie, devoted entirely to the history and various incarnations of the condom, starting back in Roman times and ending up with these crazy polyurethane condoms. In the center, here, the Statue of Liberty, among other shapes.

The vast majority of the business done in the Red Light District is from tourism, evidently. Our guide told us that 65% of the revenue from prostitution comes from British teenagers, but I'm not sure how accurate that statistic would be. Who reports that? Do the ladies take surveys when their customers come in?

In Amsterdam, one must be 16 to consume alcohol or solicit a prostitute, but 18 to consume marijuana. This strikes me as a little strange, but I guess there are probably limits to how liberal any one place can be.

After the tour, Amy and I hung around the Red Light District. It glows red from just about everywhere, and all the neon reflecting off the canal was pretty. It was packed, on a Saturday night, with tourists walking around. Restaurant owners or employees stand outside suggesting their restaurant to crowds of people with the munchies who are easily swayed by the power of suggestion. Women stand in windows with neon bikinis. Bicycle taxis heckle you, trying to convince you to go somewhere you might need or want a taxi to reach. The smell of marijuana wafts out the open doors of coffee shops. It's kind of a sensory overload. And among all the chaos, lots of swans. They looked pretty in the red light but I don't think I got a very good shot. That's the thing about red light.

The next morning we slept in and then went to the Rijksmuseum. We'd been kind of indifferent about whether we wanted to go, but I'm glad we decided to do it. I wasn't thrilled about most of the content but I think I would have been disappointed not to have seen it. Most of it is dedicated to Rembrandt, his teachers, and his students. If you're into Dutch portraits and landscapes, it's definitely the place for you.

Outside, there was this stand selling "Real American Hot Dogs". I always get a kick out of anyone selling Americana and certifying its authenticity. What's authentically American, anyway?

Monday we woke up and checked out of the hostel. I found a pancake for breakfast, and Amy had some calamari (at 10:00 in the morning. I think the waiter was confused). A Dutch pancake is kind of like a crepe. Maybe like two crepes stuck together. The middle is a lot thicker and on the edges, the two layers separate and form a bubble. This one had chocolate sauce and bananas, and it was delicious.

We got to the train station way early and got to experience a strange Dutch phenomenon. When I tried to take a number to get in line the woman working the machine asked me whether I was leaving within the hour or later. I told her later, and she gave me a number that was about 10 numbers away from being called. However, as I stood there I realized there were windows where no one was being helped, and the numbers weren't being called. The way it worked was that the people who had time to wait were given a higher number with the expectation that someone who was leaving within the hour would stroll up and go straight to a ticket window. This offended my American first-come, first-served sensibilities. It also resulted in a lot of senseless waiting.

As it turns out, the tickets we'd bought from SNCF (the French train service) on the Internet can only be picked up in France. Yeah. Because people buying one-way tickets from Amsterdam to Paris are often in Paris to start off with. Sometimes, yes, but definitely not in our case.

We had to buy new tickets (without the help of our French student discount card) and cancel our other ones via our iPhones, without which this trip would have ended in tragedy.

Our train was 35 minutes late getting into Paris, putting our connection in jeopardy. We got to Gare du Nord and took Metro line 4 all the way across the city to Montparnasse and made our train in time. We were hoping to get into Bordeaux on time, so that Amy could get the tram back to Pessac before it stopped running. But of course, the train was a half hour late. I'm not sure why we had any hope at all, by this point, after every transportation disaster we'd already encountered -- and after all we've learned about French efficiency -- but the upshot was that Amy spent the night and went back to Pessac this morning.

Today, my goals include laundry and grocery shopping and, maybe, some studying for history. I found out I don't need to take my literature final, and I can feel the end approaching. If only school would hurry up and be over. It's just been pretending thus far, anyway.