I spent the weekend in Amsterdam, visiting my friends Damon and Amanda from Seattle, who have been hanging out in Europe for the last month or so. It was a really nice time. It's a quite lovely city. If you are ever there, I highly recommend renting a little motor boat and cruising around the canals if the weather cooperates. It is such a nice way to see Amsterdam. I took a bazillion photos and put some on Flickr. Here are a few of them:
Right off the bat it stood out to me how much English I was hearing. Amsterdam, as you'd probably expect, has a ton of tourism. I heard so many British and American accents, which is really weird after more than a month of living in Sweden. Almost everyone can speak English here, but out in public I hardly ever hear it. Not as many tourists in Stockholm, especially now that it's getting cold. Also it was pretty surprising to see how many Dutch words looked like Swedish and English ones. Hooray for Germanic language similarities. Listening to people speak Dutch was pretty much entirely incomprehensible, though.
The architecture and layout of the city was pretty interesting. Buildings are mostly all really narrow and tall. The apartment my friends had rented had extraordinarily steep and narrow stairways. Most buildings are brick, and the majority of streets seem to be very narrow and paved with bricks or cobblestones. Despite those not being very nice surfaces to cycle on, there are bicycles everywhere, and very little car traffic for such a large city. I would not be surprised if there are more bikes in Amsterdam than people. The city is incredibly flat, and you are never far from a canal. I had no idea there were so many waterways. I definitely want to go back some time.
Unfortunately the return home was not as nice as the rest of the trip. I missed my flight home yesterday, and since I did not have a refundable/changeable ticket I had to buy a new one. This came as a bit of a surprise, as any time I've missed a flight in the US the airline just put me on whatever next flight they had for free or a small fee. Maybe this is a KLM thing, or maybe that's just how it goes in Europe. KLM is otherwise a pretty nice airline though. On the flight down I got free food and beer, which was unexpected for such a short trip. I ended up returning home on SAS, and they give you nothing free. They even charge for a cup of coffee if you're flying within Europe. This was really irritating to me, probably because I had just paid about €170 for this plane ticket and had to wait in Oslo for two hours.
Also, dealing with multiple currencies is really a pain. Yesterday I was trying to think in US dollars, euros, Norwegian kroners, and Swedish kronors. I know it's a complicated issue and all, but it'd be quite convenient if everybody in Europe used euros. It must have really sucked for travelers when every European country had its own currency. It's really easy to pay more than you think you're paying when dealing with an unfamiliar currency. In Oslo, I bought a coffee and pastry at the airport. It was 50 Norwegian kroners, which I only later discovered was about $9.25.
On a random note though, I really want to spend some time in Norway despite my only experiences there being an airport with overpriced food and drinks. In particular, I want to go surfing in the arctic circle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nuvgel1wqEI Plus that area of Norway, Lofoten, looks really beautiful.
