Tsang's RISE Trip

Amsterdam! (July 28 to July 30)

Catching a special to Amsterdam for the ICE train was awesome. This cut a normal bus ride of about 4-6 hrs to 2.5 hrs by the InterCityExpress train.

Amsterdam is considered the "melting pot" of Europe and in the summer, the official destination of youths on holiday. With their relaxed attitude to most things considered illegal in other countries, its hard not to find something you can't do. Along with wonderful canal walks, large parks, and a set of world class museums, there are plenty of activities to fill your day.




















We arrived in Amsterdam Centraal station at around 7:00pm and proceeded to look for our hostel. The city is layed out in a series of concentric rings centered more or less at the station. Navigating around can be quite confusing at times. However, I believe it is small enough to cover the major sites in the centre in a day. Just make sure you cross the bridge over the canal at the right point or you could end up heading back around. After making a couple wrong turns, passing through chinatown, some squares and asking conceirges of major hotels, we finally found the StayOkay Stadsdoelen which was apparently located in the red light district. However, the area around the hostel was quite nice and other than the odd sex shop/cinema around the corner, there wasn't much sign of the sex-crazed area which we discovered was a little bit further away. The rest of the night was exploring around the town, walking around the city and checking out the various shops in town including the red-light district.

We arrived at the red-light district after walking around and founds ourselves suddenly following hordes of men all heading in the same direction. Pretty soon, every coloured person (don't ask me why this is this way, it just is) on the corner of the street was asking if I was looking for "cocaine, esctasy" and one trying to advertise deviant shows. Sure enough in many windows were women selling their wares in barely covering attire making faces at you through the glass, trying to draw some attention. Everywhere, people were looking urging their buddies to go and talk to them. We overheard the price of flesh to be around 40-50 euros. In the company of Cat, we decided that was enough and heading out to hang out at some of the bars and cafes the rest of the night.

The worst thing that night was the 10 euro shaorwma that I bought for dinner which turned out to be nothing like the picture and more like ground beef on fries which was ridiculous. Fortunately that was the only poor food experience I had that weekend.

The next day, we headed out bright and early (10ish) after a free breakfast of bread and cheese to see some museums. Along with way I stopped for some hollande haring which Frommer's advised me to try. The haring is raw herring served with chopped onions. Kind of like sushi, but very fishy, but the texture was quite weird and I'm positive some scales and bones didn't make it all the way down my throat.

























We arrived at the Rijksmuseum to find it only 1/3 open and still 10 euros with no student discount. Being cheap, we decided maybe not such a good idea and headed to the Van Gogh museum. Again another 10 euros, we decided maybe if we were going to pay that much we might as well just go back to the Rijksmuseum to check out a bunch of master's work instead of just one. However, by this time, tour groups had hit the joint resulting in a long line up and we didn't feel like waiting in line so we headed to the Vongelpark which had lots of nice places to sit and watch the Dutch play with their dogs.

















Dutch bakery....actually a legit bakery.














Consulting the map...quite a regular occurance for the first couple hours.

On the way back, we hit up a movie theatre since Pirates of the Caribbean 2 was playing in ENGLISH which was amazing since all the movie theatres in Dortmund only played German movies. Sure, some of you are thinking what are you doing watching a movie in Europe and should be experiencing all it has to offer, but I'm also working here and miss the little things like sumemr blockbuster movies. After, we went for some great indian food followed by chilling out at some shop Abraxas.

The next morning, we sat at a cafe around the hostel and ate breakfast and enjoyed the Sunday morning as a member of our party recovered from a rough night. We decided to head back to the Rijksmuseum, saw the amazing story behind Nightwatch where within the painting is a description of a murder and some Dutch history. I do wish however, I got to see more of the museum because that seemed to be the only famous piece on display. However, I am not much of an avid art fan so it probably wouldn't have made much a difference to me.

Statue of Cupid


Dutch Man-O-War (I think)

Rembrant's Nightwatch...look at the musket being fired at the guy in white's head.

This was followed by rain and a search for an all you can eat Chinese place with dimsum that we walked past everytime we went downtown into the city. After being drenched by the afternoon shower, we finally arrived at "a taste of culture" and while Cat and KC enjoyed their sweet and sour sauce on fried rice, I was pleasantly surprised that the restaurant had some dim sum like sui mai and some sui long bow. I also asked the cook (in cantonese of course) if he could make some vegetarian dimsum for my friend Cat who's a veggie. We got spinach dumplings which were awesome! After dinner, we had to head back to the train station and on the way I bought a serving of bbq duck to bring home with me which topped off my trip to Amsterdam.


The Cotton Club...I worked on a bar of the same name for Sciformal NYC based on the famous "Cotton Club" jazz club of NYC's gangsta days.

posted by ktsang @ 10:04 AM