Day 19 - Amsterdam

When we woke up, we were in Antwerp.  Not like when we woke up in Dublin and had to take a shuttle to the city, or when we woke up in Southampton and had to take a train to London.  We were IN Antwerp.  We sailed quite a bit inward overnight (with the help of a tugboat) and Antwerp lay just outside the security gate.  After a pleasant 30-minute walk to the train station, I was off for Amsterdam to meet my friend Sasha.

The train station in Antwerp was the most impressive I have ever seen.  It was grandiose and beautiful, that goes without saying.  But our train was on platform 22 (of 24), and we were amazed the station could fit so many platforms.  The station was multi-layered, and trains could come in on any of 4 or 5 stories.

There were lots of SASers catching the same train, but I tried to avoid most of them.  I ended up spending the journey with Nic, a fellow student I had just gotten to know the night before.  He was one of those multi-lingual geniuses that made you feel bad about yourself.  I knew that he could speak Russian, but on the train I learned he could also understand Flemish and Dutch (along with all the more common languages) and listened to the train announcements in each language.

A Canadian student sat with us on the train, intrigued by how we were speaking both Russian and English.  Student travelers like to find each other and stick together.

About 2 ¼ hours later, we were in a new country.  We waited for Sasha at the Starbucks at the station – the fanciest Starbucks you have ever seen.  When she finally arrived, we walked into the city, passing by construction sites, countless bicycles, and sex shops.  We toured the entire city (a crowded 800,000 people), laid out concentric semicircular canals that make each street indistinguishable from the next.  Sasha showed us where all the museums and attractions were, and I promptly forgot.  We visited and climbed the “I AMsterdam" sign and saw the narrowest house, about a meter wide.  We explored the Bloemen Market, an entire street of flower stores with seeds and bulbs for every kind of plant imaginable, many of which I’d never heard of before.  We stopped in a cheese store where we filled up on samples.  The Dutch are a very tall people; they like to say it’s the cheese.

The most peculiar thing about Amsterdam is that it is completely overtaken by bicycles, and there are no clear distinctions on where to walk.  Bicycles and pedestrians take the same roads as the trams.  There are bike lanes, sometimes on the road, sometimes where you think the sidewalk would be.  Mopeds, motorcycles, and smartcars also use the bike lane.  The pedestrian lane is virtually nonexistent.  If there is a line of trees along a road, pedestrians are expected to walk between the trees.  Bicyclists get very irritated if you invade their space, expressing themselves by ringing their bells.  I nearly got run over several times.

When Sasha left us to study, Nic and I took a canal tour by boat.  Again, Nic listened to the recorded tour guide in every translation.  We learned that the houses are so narrow that furniture is brought in through the windows, thus each house has a hook protruding from the roof.  Also, housing along the canals is so expensive that many people opt to live in their houseboats.

Shortly after I arrived at my hostel for the night, two other guys sharing my room walked in.  One yelled, “I’m sooooo baked!”  There was much empty talk about how they should stop getting so high every night, then they passed out well into the next day for the third time that week.