Amsterdam

We arrived in Amsterdam on Wednesday the 12^th after a long day. We woke up in Berlin at 6am, drove to Hamburg to make the 11am tour of the city, got lunch, headed to The Netherlands around 4pm arriving at our Amsterdam hotel around 10pm. We were tired, to say the least.

We had 2 days in this city that is so beloved by everyone and we wasted more than half of the first day holed up in our hotel room trying to book a hotel for London. We will arrive in London on Sunday* and have had no luck finding an acceptable hotel as yet (we did search quite a bit in Berlin also). But, at this point we were down to the wire and HAD to find something. My conclusion is this: reasonably priced, decent hotels do not exist in London. They do not.

I found an excellent website whereby you can find a person who has a home or business with an extra parking space in London and you can pay to “rent” this space for some period of time. If you know one thing about London it's that parking (and driving, really) is not possible; think of San Francisco but with no parking lots. Good freaking luck. There actually are parking lots but they cost something like 25 GBP per day, which is like $50 AUD or $40 USD. I'm thinking that this doesn't fit into our budget. Anyway, we found a place for the car (25 GBP for a week) and were then free to look for a hotel in the city center, yeay!

Oh wait, the only hotels in the city center are a) expensive (say $200 USD min per night in like a Motel 6 sort of situation), b) really, really crappy (with user feedback like “worst place I have ever stayed", or, "whatever you do, do not stay here for any reason”), or c) not actually anywhere near the city center. And most places seemed to be a healthy combination of two or three of these. So, we spend all damn day in Amsterdam looking for an exception to these apparent truths, compromising more and more of our requirements as they day went on.

After approximately 6 hours of searching (at this point I would have paid any amount at all for a hotel where you didn't have to wade through a sea of used needles to get to the bathroom) we settled on a hotel just outside the city that had reasonable user feedback (no mention of heinous smells or contracting scabies) and was only about twice our budget. This was not a good day and, surprisingly, it didn't get much better even after we finally completed this ridiculous task.

So, we were free of homelessness for another week. We had long ago missed the day walking tours, but the night time Red Light District tour was still possible to make. So, we took the train into town and paid for a tour of the infamous red light district of Amsterdam. The tour was fine: prostitutes in storefronts, porno shops, gay bars; nothing can really surprise a person who's been to San Francisco and Vegas.

After the tour we walked around a bit looking to get some food. The city center is huge and it's completely swarming with people at all times. Narrow cobbled streets are overflowing with men, women, and children (yep, kids too) and the whole place is filthy. There is garbage everywhere; it's nasty. We stopped at a kiosk for some fries served in a paper cone that seemed to be very popular, but they were gross and stale and the man covered them in an obscene amount of “garlic sauce” which turned out to be very similar to Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing, which I hate. So Kane choked them down and I was just sad. I got an OJ so I wouldn't go to bed with a completely empty stomach, but, thus far, I was unimpressed with Amsterdam.

Our 2^nd day was a bit better. We made it out to the day walking tour, which was better executed than the tour the night before. We found the nicer part of town where the respectable people go and some attempt at cleaning had taken place since the night before as the trash that littered the town squares had been noticeably minimized. But really, I'm not sure what I was thinking going to a town known for prostitution and pot smoking, neither of which really peak my interest. It's not that I conceptually have a problem with either so much as I should have realized the people and behaviors that these activities draw would be disagreeable to me. Even though retirees and children abound, the whole area has a seedy feel – at least right in the city center and red light district. I don't think this needs to be the case, but it is.
And the place was packed. It was like being at Disneyland – every street for like a 5 mile radius was completely flooded with people. I was amazed especially since they didn't all seem to just be there for the pot. What are these people doing? There's tons of shopping, but if you want shopping don't you want to go to Paris or something? I was baffled, but I did know that the hordes of people helped to dwindle my already-minimal enjoyment of the place. If I were to do it again, I'd probably skip good old Amsterdam and leave it for the people who appreciate it.

P.S. - Please do check out my pics, however, for Germany, Prague, and Amsterdam (see last entry for the former 2).

*Yes I realize that I'm quite behind on the blogging. I wrote this entry in the car on our way from Amsterdam to London and we've been in London for 5 days now. I will try to catch up in the next week, provided we have reliable internet.