Weekend in Amsterdam

I spent the weekend in Amsterdam with some friends, and it's a truly beautiful city. We were lucky enough to have clear, sunny skies which made the town's abundant canals and trees look even prettier.

Everything in Amsterdam is notably clean and orderly, unlike dog-mess-littered France. For better or for worse, pretty much all Dutch people seem to speak almost-perfect English; the people working at our hostel almost sounded like native speakers.

My biggest observation, though, was the number of bicycles everywhere. At all times of the day, people navigate Amsterdam by bike—and never wearing helmets. Bikes are locked to anything stationary and some roads have six lanes, with individual lanes for bikes, cars, and trams. The town as a whole is very historic with all sorts of old buildings, churches, and narrow streets.

The Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

The "New Church"... which was built in the 15th century.

We went on a tour boat that wound through the canals which was really interesting. We saw, for example, an apartment building that's just 1.5 meters wide and the "Skinny Bridge" that isn't really all that skinny. I also learned that Amsterdam is home to 2500 house boats—people live on boats permanently moored in the canals. And let's not forget Sea Palace, which holds the dubious title of "largest floating Chinese restaurant in Europe." Who verified that and where the larger one outside of Europe is, I'll never know. The tour was in both Dutch and English, and I have to say, Dutch sounds very, very similar to English. Written Dutch seems especially similar: a sign saying "Deur ez defect" bore the English translation "Door is broken".
Amsterdam also has a cool science museum called Nemo, which caused obligatory "Finding Nemo" jokes. It's a giant building made to look like a ship within which you can play with science. It was really cool and was designed for people our age as well as children.

Another surprisingly interesting location was the Rembrandt Museum, a once formerly owned by painter Rembrandt until he defaulted on his payments. He's obviously celebrated for his paintings, but apparently was also a prolific etcher; the museum contained all sorts of line etchings by Rembrandt. One really cool exhibit: the same etching printed onto "European" and "Japanese" style paper gave completely different visual effects.

I really liked Amsterdam and had a good time, although a weekend was probably plenty of time there. I now have a few days here in Aix before I go to Spain on Thursday. I should probably start working on homework, actually, because I'll have a lot of work due the week after our two-week vacation ends.