Two Tries Get To The Netherlands

This was our second attempt to get to The Netherlands. Finally, after an emergency appendectomy, two injured knees and a cancer scare, we were on our way.

The last Boston beer before taking off

My travel companion

The flight from Boston to Amsterdam is about seven hours, not bad if you’re in first class. We weren’t.

What a seven hour flight does to a person

We arrived at Schiphol Airport about 8:00am. No need to rush to the hotel because our room wouldn’t be ready. This worked out well because we had to wait an hour for our luggage to come around. Apparently they didn’t off load our bags. Maybe my clothes were trying to make it to Paris.

We stayed at the NH Hotel in Amsterdam. We decided to take a cab. We didn’t need those 30 Euros anyway. What I didn’t know is that there are 13 NH Hotels in Amsterdam alone. Yeah, we went to the wrong one. It was a nice morning for a walk, just not trailing 100 pounds of luggage on a cobblestone street.

After we stored our luggage and begged, begged for our room to be ready by noon, we set out to see a bit of the city. We walked to Museumplein where the Rjiksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum are located and had delicious sugar waffle with cherries and a cappuccino.

Delicious sugery waffle and the first of many, many cappucinos

I will be making some ignorant generalizations about Dutch people through out this trip report. Here’s one of them; everybody smokes. You can’t smoke indoors, but you can just about everywhere else.

It's still fabulous to smoke in Europe

It was getting near time for our room to be ready, so we headed back. We stayed on Spuistraat, which was a great spot for anyone, but especially us. It is centrally located and packed with cafes, bars and bistros.

Spuistraat

NH Hotel is nice and mid-priced.The rooms are small, clean and well appointed but nothing fancy.

The view was pretty sweet

After a “Disco Nap” we set out to meet Ken, a colleague of Jeff’s, for dinner. He has been living in Amsterdam for a number of years. I guess he’s an ex-pat, but he was very interested in coming back to the states. Does that count?

There are local Dutch specialties like asparagus and “Frites” (these are just French fries folks, nothing to get excited about), but for the most part the restaurants here are either ethnic, like Mexican, Thai etc. or pub grub.

Argentinian Marinated Steak

Cappucino!

After dinner Ken took us for the obligatory tour of the Red Light District. This was kinda weird. Everybody knows about this place. Prostitution and pot are either legal, or at least decriminalized here. The “Coffee Shops” as they are called are all around the city. This doesn’t seem as strange. People just hang around here but instead of drinking a beer they are smoking a joint. The Red Light is different. We made a very quick pass though the main part. You could see the young women in the windows with the eerie red lights glowing. It seemed surreal. They are real people up there, you know? They are someone’s daughter or sister or even mom. It was sad to me.

We stopped at another place for a beer before we headed back to collapse. I had a big day of museuming ahead of me.