Amsterdam - Another Magical City to Discover

 Upon arrival in Amsterdam, we spent what was left of the day recovering from jet lag. We have to admit it gets harder to do these long overnight flights accompanied by an eight-hour time change. Our circadian clocks were beating us up, so we slowed down to let it catch up. 

Our first full day, Sunday, was spent learning how to use the public transportation and learning to cross a street and walk on a sidewalk again. Amsterdam is an expensive city to live in. Because of this, most people don’t have cars. Public transportation is excellent with numerous trams, buses, subways and trains. But to really navigate the inner city, you need a bike. Everyone has a bike, and that’s where the re-learning came in for us. It seemed everyone was on their bike at high-speed heading straight into the space where we were. As we’ve noted in other countries, the space between the pedestrians and moving vehicles is very small and the bicycles only added another dimension to the puzzle of interacting. It was very intimidating at first.

Walking the sidewalks means staying out of the bike lane which is a dedicated portion of the sidewalk. Crossing a street involves entering a bike lane. Bike lanes have their own traffic lights controlling bike traffic and giving bikes left and right turn lanes protected from cars. As pedestrians, we are on the low end of the pecking order. Fortunately, traffic flow involves right-side of the road driving so knowing to look left first is a learned instinct that served us well. Bikes are everywhere.   

Once you’ve successfully navigated the bike lane, you get to cross the one or two traffic lanes and then another bike lane. We learned to use the well-marked and well-timed controlled crosswalks.

We then mastered the public transportation. It’s easy to use, but there was a learning curve. Our experience in navigating Budapest proved useful here. I’m being a little loose in using the word mastered. More like ‘get-by’ is the appropriate phrase.

We spent the afternoon in the Van Gogh Museum. We loved it. Van Gogh’s brother and nephew established the museum which is huge and sustainable on its own now.

We headed back to the central station area to just explore. In a nice little cafe, we found a dish called bitter balls. It is a meat based soup or stew that is chilled and rolled until firm and rolled into balls like meat balls. Then rolled in a crust and fried. They were outstanding. Susanne also tried the local version of gin called Genever. Not bad at all.

As we headed back toward the hotel in the evening, we randomly stopped in at the Armoury for a night cap. I say random, but actually it was the only place open on our path. As we entered, we saw four tables with people playing some unknown board game with a board that evolved as the game matured. We sat down at the bar in the back of the room. As happens, we struck up a conversation with the man next to us, who was from Jacksonville. He explained that the club we were in was known for playing board games. On this Sunday, and every Sunday night, they play Dungeons and Dragons. On other days, the table could be any other board game, many of which we’d never heard of. We’d popped into an iconic club for gamers. How much fun. The word of the day was synchronicity.

We found the people of Amsterdam very friendly. Even acknowledging your presence when you passed them on the street. Their command of English is inspiring. We’re not about to drift into how we feel about America’s lack of supporting a multi-lingual culture. We drifted to sleep hoping we’d conquered the jet-lag but woke up realizing it was still with us.