Amsterdam

Hola,

Ali (my sister) came this Wednesday so I didn't have time to write about Amsterdam, so here are two entries about the last two weekends.

Last weekend (19th-21st of November), the majority of Duke Study Abroad in Europe went to Amsterdam. We had friends come from all over (London, Barcelona, Leon, Prague, etc.) to explore this city together. We had something like 40 people staying in our hostel and then other friends all over the city. This is how this weekend transpired:

We arrived in Amsterdam with late on Thursday evening excited about getting to this new city. Immediately we knew we had come to the right place. The people greeted us in almost perfect English and when we walked out of the train station there were lights (we assumed Christmas) all over the place. The 40 degree weather was quite a change from a standard 55 of 60 in Madrid, but we zipped up our jackets and tried to find the hostel.

Our hostel, The Flying Pig (Picture 1), gave us directions along the lines of "exit the train station, take a right and then walk down the alley and you'll find us." When we arrived we could see why. We opened were greeted by clubbing music, just loud enough that we couldn't hear the lady who wanted to check us in. Also in the lobby were a pool table and a smoking room (only in Amsterdam.) After briefly getting settled a group ventured out towards to carpe diem, eventually ending up in the red light district (for purely touristic purposes.

People's excuse for visiting Amsterdam is often something like "The city is beautiful too," which I thought might be in along the same lines of "I don't care how ugly Crocs are, they're really comfortable" (i.e. false); nevertheless, Amsterdam is actually a beautiful town that a couple of tourist commodities have been added too. The perfect example is the Red Light district, which runs right along one of the many canals in of the city. Just like the others, this canal is bordered by old Scandinavian/Dutch houses and has many bridges criss-crossing over top of the water. The only difference here is that here there are prostitutes standing in the windows calling to the passersby, not to mention the swans swimming in the middle of the steam and all of the red lights surrounding it. (Picture 10)

Some of the other highlights of the weekend were these: Going with at least three different groups to take pictures at the I amstersdam signs- see facebook for evidence (Picture 5), seeing the Anne Frank House (Pictures 3 and 4) and the Van Gogh Museum (Picture 6) - which has his paintings like Room at Arles and Sunflowers, enjoying the cuisine, like Dutch Pancakes (Picture 9) (which are like a mix or crepes and pancakes, the one I got was bacon and banana), and Febo (Picture 7) (a serve yourself fast food place where you put a coin in the slot and get anything from mozzarella sticks to hamburgers.)

In other words while it rained, we still all loved Amsterdam.

Hasta ahora

Brent

(I'm going to write the Spanish lesson in the next post)