Yesterday was another great day here in Amsterdam. It was grey, windy and rainy when we woke up but by the time we got to the city centre it was clear and sunny.
We started the day with pastries from the bakery again and ate them on our way to the tram. Our first destination was the Hermitage Museum but it took us a while to get there. Along the way we stopped for fries with mayo and people watched a bit on Damark, one of the busiest streets. We wandered through Dam Square, found some cough medicine and sunglasses for Brandon, and browsed through a tourist shop before making our way further along to the museum.
Because we’d bought our tickets the day before we were able to skip the line completely and walk right in saving us a solid two hours. The reason for going there is really because the van Gogh museum is closed for renovation and the largest and most famous paintings have been moved there. And they’re beautiful. It was really busy so it was hard to really appreciate all the paintings the way they deserve, but I feel privileged to have seen them. There were a few missing I’d loved to have seen, Starry Night and Café Terrace in particular, but some I’d never seen pretty much made up for that.
We stopped for a coffee and then went through the rest of the museum where we saw paintings by Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, and Degas. All of them amazing and beautiful.
We left there and headed back to the red light district to visit sex museum number two. This one wasn’t nearly as good as the first, but it did have a bicycle doing very naughty things to a mannequin girl which was rather funny. But we were really getting sick of seeing naked bodies and things made out of penises so we didn't spend too much time in the museum.
We’d kind of run out of ideas of what to do for not much money so we made a quick stop in at the Condomerie, a shop that sells every kind of prophylactic you can think of including novelty ones shaped like windmills and cows. We made our way back slowly to the tram and like the party animals we are, we went back to the hotel where we had dinner in our room, did some laundry in the sink and repacked our bags for checking out in the morning.
Sunday morning we kept with our theme of sleeping in and got everything sorted in our room before checking out at 11. The hotel stored our bags for us and we headed out into the city centre for the last time. We stopped at Westermarket again for breakfast at a pancake shop. We both had bacon and apple pancakes which were really, really good. Too small, but really good. We decided that we would shop for a few things to bring home so that’s how we spent about an hour wandering through some of the shops in Dam Square and back again through the red light district and then back up to Central Station. We stopped for a coffee there before getting back on the tram and heading back out the hotel.
Amsterdam was a great start to our vacation. It was comfortable, it was easy to get around in, people were mostly friendly and we felt safe everywhere we went. I didn't really know what to expect of the city, especially since it's reputation is mostly all about sex and drugs. But there's a huge art scene and it's so easy to just wander and spend time watching people and looking at the old buildings. The canals are beautiful and with something like 1200 bridges, there's always a photo waiting to be taken.
We bought tickets for the airport shuttle when we arrived and asked the front desk to arrange our pick up the night before. They were worried though that because we’d only given them 20 hours notice instead of 24 they might not be able to accommodate us, even though the driver on the way from the airport told us they only needed two hours notice. He was late, but our driver arrived in a Mercedes Benz sedan instead of the minibus we were expecting and even though he missed the exit for the airport, we arrived on time and in style.
The line up to check in and drop baggage was really long and by the time we were through we decided it best to go right through security and hope for food on the other side. There was some, but it just about cost more than the actual flights did and it was far from good. We had to wait for quite a while for them to announce our gate and when they did there was the requisite mad dash for the door that accompanies any discount airline flight with a rush seating policy. After making our way through two crazy lines, we were able to get seats together at the back of the very full plane which made me happy. The flight was about an hour and forty minutes long and even before we were on the ground we could feel the Roman warmth. 22 degrees at 9pm? Awesome! We got our back packs and quickly found our way to the train station where Brandon skipped the line by buying our tickets for the Leonardo da Vinci express to Termini Station and a little more than half an hour later we were in the centre of Rome.
Getting a little lost, we eventually found our way out of the station and to the condo complex where we were to check into our hotel. We were buzzed into a courtyard where eventually a girl came down in her slippers and pajamas (it was 11pm after all) only to tell us that there was a water issue at the other place where we were staying and that we’d be sleeping there, in another guest house for the night. Okay, a little annoying, but at least there was a bed for us. We got in, changed really quickly out of long sleeved shirts and went out for a quick dinner. It wasn’t very good but it wasn’t bad either and we were soon back in bed and quickly asleep, ready for the first full day in Rome to start!
No comments:
Post a Comment