Well, in 4 days I went from having been to 7 European countries, to having been to 9 European countries. How cool am I? (the answer is way cool). My Amsterdam flight was very early in the morning, and I had to wake up very, very early to get a ride from Corinne (bless her little heart for driving me) to the airport in Basel, about an hour and a half away from Zurich. Once it got to about midnight I decided the best course of action was to stay up all night rather than sleep for only a few hours. At 4am we left Corinne´s, drove to the airport, and I got myself all organised and checked in. Waiting for the plane was torture because I started to realise how tired I was, but the flight was pleasant and I got the unique pleasure of seeing the sun-rise over Holland from above Holland. Very cool. The Amsterdam airport is insane! It´s huge and it was packed, and when I went to the info desk to find out where my hostel is I found out there were 2 hostels with the same name and I didn´t know which one Nikki was reserved at! Eep! I took a stab and went to the downtown one, which wasapparently the right one because Nikki was in the lobby! Yay! Now our Amsterdam Christmas adventure could really begin!
Now follows the censored version of our Amsterdam adventure:
Amsterdam was nice. We went to the Anne Frank museum and the Van Gogh museum. I had a good Christmas.
Now follows the uncensored version of our Amsterdam adventure (read at your own risk):
Amsterdam is tits!!! After getting checked in we imediately found a coffee shop near the hostel and (get this) ordered weed off a menu! No matter how many times I heard people say they did this in Amsterdam, it did not prepare me for the incredible awesomeness of doing it in real life! Off a menu! Fantastic! We got baked and did a bunch of walking around the red-light district, then around the china-town area, eventually leading us to get some really tasty asian food. After that there was more walking around the red light district. Nikki was nervous about walking through the main red light streets with all the hookers because ti was now dark out, but I was like "dude, this is a tourist city!" there was a gift shop sandwiched between two hooker windows. How much more tame can you get? What was really interesting was the looks on hte different hookers´faces in the windows. Some looked really excited to be there, some bored, some impassive, some challenging. It was very crazy ans surreal. Afterwards we went back to the hostel for more weed, dinner, and then ventured out one more time to go to the highly graphic "Sex Museum". It had a collection of pornography, ancient sex symbols and statues, mannequinns, cartoons, erotic novelties, and lots of paintings and pictures of naked people. A good way to spend an hour in Amsterdam if there ever was one! Next we returned to the hostel again for our horrible collapse of tiredness at around 11pm. We both were running on little (or in my case no) sleep.
The next morning was Christmas eve day, and we decided to pakc in the majority of our sightseeing because we figured nothing would be open on xmas day. We started the day sober (gasp I know!) in order to go to the Ann Frank museum. It was really incredible to see the apartment they hid in, the original diary, and a ton of other stuff from the family, including video footage of her father after the war (heart-breaking). After a few hours in hte museum, we were feeling pretty heavy, so we decided that the best plan was to commence the hostel´s reccommended "coffee shop tour" and get baked. We went to a coffee shop called the "rock café", which had a really bitchy girl working there. After getting high and playing cards for a bit, we continued with the tour, which took us from North to South Amsterdam through many of the busy roads, including hte posh shopping area. The best suprprise of the walk was when we passed over a bridge and saw a man on a small motor-boat, decked out in ribbons, playing a peddle-powered organ with a foot-pedal, and accompanying himself on hte french horn then trumpet, all whilst boating around in circles. We watched him for many minutes and could discern no reason for him doing it, other than accute awesomeness. It was incredible!
We veered off the tour in search of the Van Gogh museum (a must-see if you´re in Amsterdam and even remotely like art). It turns out that they advertise the off-site museum gift-shop with several signs in giant, red, block letters. You can see the gift shop from a block away. The museum itself is across the park from the gift shop, behind a large building, and with the world´s smallest and saddest sign ever! Because of this and the fact that we were still high, it took us about half an hour to find the museum, even though we asked for directions 3 times. What a terrible system! The Van Gogh museum is really amazing. There are 3 floors of art and one floor with info and toilets, etc. The top floor is all Van Gogh paintings, hung beside info panels with snippets about his life. All the paitings are in chronogloical order, so you can really see his progression as an artist. Favourite painting? Toss up between the sunflower painting (holy friggin wow) and a painting he did of a skeleton smoking a cigarette (that´s just hilarious). The next floor down is paintings from throughout his career juxtaposed with paintings by artists of his time that worked with him or otherwise inspired him. The best thing about this floor was that you could directly see which of his paintings were inspired by whom in his early career, also they had a ton of Gaugin´s work and I friggin LOVE Gaugin! There was also tons of info panels here. The bottom floor was random art that had nothing to do with Van Gogh, but is cool anyway, only by the time we got here the museum was closing, so we had to rush through.
After this it was getting to be late-ish and we were cold and hungry, so we took a tram back to the hostel to make dinner. Before dinner we chilled out in the smoking room of the hostel (it used to be you could smoke weed anywhere, but due to recent laws, there has to be a smoking section in a residential-type building... guess which room was the most popular?). In there we met a boisterous Edinburgh lad and American girl, who told us that there was a Christmas Eve pub crawl happening that night and that we would be fools not to go. Damn fools even! I could not possibly resist the hilarious novelty of going on a pub crawl on Christmas Eve in Amsterdam, so we rushed dinner and then went out of the town. The deal was that you pay 15 euros and get free admission into every bar, a free drink at each bar, free all-you-can-drink shots at the first bar, and shots upon entering most bars. I was excited for the free liquor, because poorness means that I couldn´t afford to buy any drinks at the bars. Unfortunately the shots were really watered down and sugary, and the free drinks were small, so it took forever to actually get drunk. I did, however, fully abuse the free shots rule at the first bar.
We were supposed to be in the first pub for an outrageous amount of time, because the crawl leaders wanted to wait for stragglers to show up. So after our free drinks were done and the shots ran out, Nikki, the Scotsman, an adorable asian named Shumpei, and an Indian guy whose name I forget, and I, decided to deek out of the pub and head to a nearby coffee shop to kill some time. We wound up going to the first ever coffee shop in Amsterdam (the Bulldog), buying 4 pre-rolled joints, and smoking on of them. In a much better mood we returned to the pub crawl. The crawl was awesome and included much drinking and dancing, meeting lots of cool people, and smoking the otehr 3 joints. The 2 coolest things in the night, was when it turned midnight and officially Christmas, white snow-like confetti exploded on everyone from the ceiling. The other amazing thing was at one pub they had fire breathers! The bartenders were just working away, making drinks, then suddenly each of them picked up a torch and a big liquor bottle and blew back-and-forth fire balls for about 10 minutes. It was insanely cool! At the end of the night we followed a brother and sister from Montreal home to our hostel, after getting thouroughly lost first, and crawled into bed.
Christmas morning we accidentally slept through breakfast and weren´t allowed in the kitchen to make coffee because of after-breakfast clean-up, so I read in the smoking room while Nikki stayed in bed nursing a hangover (ah the Christmas hangover, a classic!). Eventually she got up, we got coffee and a healthy breakfast of cookies, and recorded our Christmas video in the lounge area before getting stoned (not that you could tell from the video). The whole Christmas day was spent in between the smoking room and the lounge area, getting high, watching movies, looking up internet comics, meetings Australians, and eating junk food. Also, I spent the whole of Christmas wearing a santa hat and my batgirl t-shirt (happy batmas). We went outside only once, to go to a coffee shop called "Ben" and get chips with garlic sauce (way better than ketchup!). The night culminated in a back-to-back viewing of the Big Lebowski and Yellow Submarine (guess which one I brought). All in all it was a great Christmas, and I was really glad to spend it with Nikki because she is a dear friend of many years past.
Frig that was a lot of writing! Well, we´re all updated until Christmas and I´ll write the rest later.
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