Amsterdam.

This past weekend Shawn, a few American kids and I visited Amsterdam. If you only want to know whether all you heard about the city is true, I'll tell you now that it is, but read on for more details. Upon arriving to Amsterdam a few things are instantly noticable: the crowd there is a lot more multicultural than Prague, everyone rides a bike, the streets are dirtier, and there really are no streets, mostly just canals. Getting around the city is confusing because not only does every street/canal look the same, but everything is named - the streets, canals, bridges, squares, and when these four things happen to all be in the same place things get ugly.

I'm not going to post what we did in chronological order because I want to save the rest for last. The highlights were, however, visiting the Rijksmuseum, the Heineken musuem, checking out the infamous Red Light district and biking around the Netherlands like true Dutch. I'll start with the Red Light District.

Sex, Drugs

De Wallen in Amsterdam, also known as the Red Light District, is even more crazy than you've heard. Yes, prostitution, marijuana and hash is legal here, and you can get all three for a price in this one neighbourhood (although 'coffeeshops' that sell weed/hash are all over the city). If you visit this neighbourhood at night, you'll find narrow shop windows with scantily clad prostitues standing behind them, calling you over to ask for their price. What's surprising is the fact that a lot of them aren't the ugly kind of hooker you imagine, and that the curtains indicating busy or free open and close often during the night. I looked it up on wikipedia, and apparently 1 in 35 women in Amsterdam is a prositute, of which the majority are foreign. Also, they rent out each window for a certain price a night and they'd need at least two or three 'jobs' to make that rental make sense. Supply and demand would tell me that there's a disgustingly high number of men who keep them employed... As for the coffeeshops, yes, when you walk in you're given a menu of different types of weed served in different ways. Inside you'll find all kinds of people, young, old, rich, poor. Amsterdam clearly takes freedom to a whole new level and leaves moral issues for the people to figure out on their own.

Heineken

Friday we visited the Heineken brewery/museum, and since I've already posted about the experience at Pilsen where Pilsener-Urquell is brewed, I'm only going to mention the stark contrast between the two. The biggest difference is that Pilsener-Urquell is very GOOD beer, with not much global marketing, while Heineken is pretty good beer with amazing global brand marketing. Their history is very impressive - Grandpa Heineken bought an existing brewery in the late 1800s with no beer brewing experience, but through his (and later his descendants') marketing and advertising skill Heineken became an international brand. This shows one of the biggest differences between the Dutch and the Czechs; the Czechs are reserved, keep to themselves and hog the treasures they develop, while the Dutch have always created treasures through their mercantile expertise.

Ultimate Biking Adventure

Tighe, Shawn and I rented bikes and went on a crazy biking adventure on Saturday. We found a brochure outlining a cool bike tour up the Amstel river (we were going south, but I'm saying up because I think we were biking against the flow of the river) and we tried to follow it as best we can. The tour led us past two authentic Dutch windmills from the 1600s, a statue of Rembrandt, and a lot of Dutch countryside.

The Dutch countryside is very beautiful, it's in stark contrast to Amsterdam. It's all rolling, green meadows, and this particular part of the country, sliced in half by the Amstel. On either side of the river there would occasionally be a small brick house with straw roof, but mostly just animal farms. We saw a lot of sheep and some ponies, and the smell reminded me of Sebesul de Jos only less pronounced. The halfway mark of the offical bike route, where we were supposed to turn around, ends in a little village called Oudekerk. The village is very small and cozy, everything is very clean and proper, all the houses are tiny and well kept and surround little restaurants, churches or community halls. It reminded me a lot of a few levels in the first Medal of Honor for Xbox. We were hungry when we got there so we biked to another city called Amstelveen, where we had a huge late lunch, then biked back home. The trip was over 30km in the end, but it was a lot of fun. It was great to see the Netherlands outside of Amsterdam, and to meet some Dutch people outside the city too. They were very nice - we ran into an older man and his wife or friend at a Catholic church we tried going inside but couldn't figure out how, and we talked a bit about where we were from and he told us we should do a canal tour in Amsterdam (which we didn't do unfortunately).

The Rijksmuseum

Before flying into Amsterdam this was the one thing I was most excited about, and it didn't disappoint. The majority of the museum was closed, but the best part was open and fortunately not too busy. It was definitely the best museum I've ever been to (that's not saying much, I haven't been to many). They didn't just have famous painting, they also had artifacts from the Dutch Golden Age. They had pistols, muskets, swords, loot, gifts from other countries, and models and depictions of man-o-wars and important battles. A lot of the paintings in the museum were portraits or narratives, they showed rich colonial landowners from Indonesia, admirals and sea captains, majors and governors, battles and events. The museum had a large collection of Rembrandt and his contemporaries, and this is the first time I didn't get bored in an art gallery. Each painting had good descriptions not just of the subjects but also of the techniques employed. Until that day I didn't know how big a difference brush size and stroke type had, or how much paint was used. I liked how some artists experimented with different lighting techniques, and some even experimented with 'depth of field' - the focus of the painting was sharp (precise, almost invisible brush strokes) and the background was dark, dull and slightly blurry (bigger brush, less precise strokes). The museum's map showed that The Night Watch was in a separate room, and I knew it was the most famous painting, but I thought the separate room was just hype. It wasn't. The painting takes up an ENTIRE wall! The people in the painting are slightly larger than life size! It was the largest, most impressive painting I'd ever seen, even at that size every detail was perfect and the lighting is incredible. (Check wikipedia to see what it looks like.) All in all, Amsterdam was a fun time. If you're curious, check out my Flickr set for more photos.