Europe - Day 1 - Amsterdam

Good Lord, I just realized I took over 500 pictures in 2 1/2 weeks! I'll try to condense it down, but we'll see how it goes. To summarize the trip: Train rides, hotel rooms, and consuming of large amounts of cheese, bread and wine.

I took the red-eye on a Thursday night - my flight left at 11pm and I arrived in Amsterdam at 6am. Since they wouldn't let me check in at the hotel quite yet, I wandered around for three hours trying to find an internet cafe so I could get some work done. Here's one of the first things I saw across the street from the hotel:


So I heard about the death of Michael Jackson from grafitti on a porta-potty in Amsterdam.

During my long trek in which I was mostly cursing my Swiss Army backpack (a horrible way to carry a laptop around a city, no waist strap so it kills your back), I saw the town square and the National Monument:


And the flower market, which of course was closed at this early hour:


I finally found a place with free internet, which turned out to be ONE BLOCK from my hotel. All that walking and it was just around the corner!

Later that evening when David arrived from Germany, we were able to take a little tour of the Red Light District. No, I didn't take any pictures of the ladies in their undies in the windows, I figured they're exploited enough.

You know you're close when you see signs like this:

This is Belle, and the inscription read "Respect Sexworkers All Over The World".


That's David there (bottom lefthand corner) at the open-air "Urinoir". Apparently he tried to go, but admitted later he couldn't, he got stagefright.

I love policemen on horses!

Here's the infamous "coffee shops", where they sell you-know-what, including Funny Brownies. (Kids, ask your parents).


To come full circle, we saw this on the other side of the porta-potty on the way back to the hotel for the night.

So true.