Unique Amsterdam

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Trip Start Apr 13, 2010 Previous
Entry Trip End Sep 10, 2010 Next
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  Arnhem, Gelderland, Netherlands
Tuesday, June 15, 2010

We spent most of our flight catching up on sleep.  A couple of hours later our plane touched down in Amsterdam.  We could only meet up with our couch surfer at 10pm so had a day worth of adventures to get through until then.  We walked down the road into central Amsterdam.  Every second shop is a food, sex, weed or shoe shop (so many shoes shops for some reason).  We checked out some souvenir stores that have some pretty cool things.  We turned down random roads window shopping.  After a while we stumbled upon the red light district which has girls standing in the windows wearing not much.  They wiggle there bodies and tap on the windows trying to entice passer bys.  At the start of the street the girls are decent looking, but as you head up the road there are a lot of fat, black, grandma girls and it makes you laugh when those ones wiggle.  
One thing we noticed is that there are a ton of bikes everywhere.  Holland has more bikes than people.  There are a lot of bike thefts and the stolen bikes get left all over the city and never claimed, so there are bikes that have been sitting around for years.  Everyone in Holland rides bikes (seriously everyone).  They have traffic lights for bikes and people ring there little bells when you are in there way (so cute).  I guess so many people ride bikes because Holland is so flat.  They have no mountains and 30% of the country is actually below sea level.  Back in the day they used windmills to pump water out of these areas, now they use electric pumps.  We checked out a coffee shop, there are so many types of weed (white rhino, ak47, ice cream, black widow to name a few).  Crazy how they have shops specially for it here. White Rhino really does the trick, I didn't really know what we were up to for the rest of the day I just followed Sam around.  The dairy like shops sell weed chocolate, drinks, lollie pops and biscuits.  They even have movie theatres that play porno all day, would be kinda weird going and watching a movie with random people.  Its also lame because you have to pay 50c euro to use a toilet.  
It was getting late so we trained to our meeting spot where we fell asleep in the station.  We were woken later by security saying we couldn’t sleep there.  We headed outside and soon after got picked up by Theo (our cs host).  He stays in Haarlin which is about 10min from Amsterdam central.  His house is really nice, all matching with wooden floors.  We crashed on Theos couch.  Theos a extra nice guy and let us ride his bikes around.  Its actually totally fun mucking round on bikes after not riding for so long.  We headed to the supermarket and bought ingredients to make lasagne for dinner and some other goodies that we could afford because we were saving on accommodation.  When we went to buy some cheese we found that they don’t have ordinary cheese, just a lot of fancy cheese.  We dropped off our groceries and biked to the train station.  We had organised to meet up with Violet (who we got rescued from Mt Doom with).  We met up with Violet and then spent the morning wondering around until we met up with her friend.  They have these take aways that are kinda like a giant vending machine inside.  You put your coins in a slot and then open the little window and get your food.  I got a croquet (Dutch food, crunchy crumbed outside with meat and potato inside).  Sam thought he would be tricky and try get two croquettes.  He pulled on two windows, but they didn’t open and he got none.  We headed into a sheesha bar and tried some strawberry sheesha.  Later gapped it back to Theos house and cooked up the lasagne.  Was a good change from what we had been eating.  We then went for a 4km bike ride with Theo to the pub.  Riding bikes is funny, but our asses were getting sore.  It was actually a bit cold out,  first time in like 7 months.  We had a couple kick back beers and chatted about this and that and then peddled back to Theos crib.  We crashed on his couch again.  In the morning we made pancakes, yus.  I had nutella on mine.  We also had ice creams that were meant to be for desert after dinner.  Theo gave us a ride into town and we said our goodbyes.  He is super friendly and helpful, was good times staying with him.  
 We had heard about a skate comp that was on so went and watched some skaters bust out the moves for a couple hours.  One kid was like 6 years old and doing tricky tricks.  Violet had invited us to stay at her place for a night so we march our way across town to the train station just in time to miss Violet and our train.  We were forced to jump onto the next one.  An hours train ride and we should have been in Arlim.  Two hours later we ended up in Eindhoven (its kinda like boarding a train to Tauranga and ending up at Port Waikato).  A guy at the train station showed us a map and we discovered how far away we were.  Another train was boarded and another two hours and we arrived in the correct town.  At least we got to check out some of south Holland.  When we got to Violets we were surprised with a cake that her cousins had made us for saving Violet from Mt Doom.  We spent some time eating and watching TV.  At about 12.30 we headed to the Arlim night life.  Again we rode bikes but this time Sam doubled me on a seat on the back.  We were way unco and kept nearly falling off  (made us laugh a whole bunch).  We popped into a couple places and listened to some um tiss um tiss.  Some guy called us Jesus and Osama and though he was really funny.  In the morning we had some cereal for breakfast and watched a movie on the laptop before boarding the correct train back to Amsterdam to meet our new couch surfing host, Lewis.

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