Tackling Amsterdam Day 1

I spent the morning drinking tea in a hookah bar, reading more of my David Sedaris book and writing in my journal. I met up with Debbie and her friends who go to IAU and Debbie’s friend Eva who is studying in Amsterdam for the semester. We walked around exploring different shops and eventually arrived at the Van Gogh museum. By then it was just Debbie, Eva and I and we spent a good 3 hours walking around looking at Van Gogh paintings. As cliché as it is, Van Gogh is one of my favorite painters and the exhibit was incredible. I loved every minute of it. After we finished there we decided to make a new route back to Central Station but got insanely lost, for about 2 hours. Since I had to catch a train to Hoofddorp to meet up with Anna from camp I gave up and hopped on a tram back to where I needed to be.

I grabbed my train to Hoofddorp, which was about a 20 minute ride. Anna’s brother Tim picked me up from the station and then we went to get Anna from work. I had the best hot chocolate I have ever tasted at the restaurant Anna works at. The hot chocolate in France is crap so it was a nice change. Tim cooked me a burger and fries for dinner and we hung out at their place until about midnight drinking beer and watching Tim’s friend do his impressions of Elvis, which by the way were fantastic. Around midnight we decided to go to a couple bars in Hoofddorp. Anna let me use her bike and she rode her mom’s. I felt like a native weaving through the back streets, along the canals on a classic dutch bike in a pack to the bars. The first bar we went to was a pretty average bar. We drank and played pool and eventually decided to change our scene. Tim said I had to go to the next bar because it was a true Dutch bar. The Dutch are officially crazy. I can’t really describe it but it was loud and packed. People were bouncing off the walls, dancing, singing and drinking. It was fun but unbearably hot. We headed home and passed out around 2 or 3 am.