Zaans Schans, THE NETHERLANDS (2008)

Amsterdam, Zaans Schans and Harlem, THE NETHERLANDS (Stop 4-6: EuroTrip 2008)

AMSTERDAM, ZAANS SCHANS AND HARLEM, THE NETHERLANDS                     

June 6-7, 2008

DAY 1 (12)

We finally made it to Amsterdam! And what an amazing city it is! The Dutch are probably the nicest people in the world, by far the nicest we’ve met during this trip.

We checked into our hostel around 1 am last light because of all our delays etc. The place was DISGUSTING!! So gross. Hans Brinker Hostel- remember the name so you never end up there. They’re motto actually is “It can’t get any worse.” Sadly we didn't realize that until we checked in to the grungy lobby. We were in a room with 6 beds on the seconds story. Sheets with stains (thank God for our fake-me-out sleeping bags!), small lockers filled with graffiti and gross smells. A tiny bathroom with no hot water and terrible water pressure. Overall the worst hostel I could have ever dreamt of. At least there were no bugs or mice. Ugh. Good to know it can’t get any worse from here on out. 


With that said…

We had an amazing time in the city today. We started with another free walking tour, which was a fantastic way to learn the history of The Netherlands (Holland being the region Amsterdam is in) in comparison to the rest of the continent. Basically, the Dutch are all about money- so if you pay your taxes or give the government some money you can get away with pretty much anything. They’ll just look the other way (i.e. Jewish synagogues in the midst of Protestant Persecution, drugs of many kinds, including the “illegal” marijuana sales, and of course the prostitution in the Red Light District. Awesome history and such beautiful architecture and scenery. There are canals and bridges everywhere you look, not to mention a million and three bicycles. They are said to have 3x more bikes than people in the city. Cool huh? Fun way to get green and make your way around the narrow sidewalks are roads.

After the tour, we decided to go see the Anne Frank House. You get to follow her story and go through the rooms of the house where they actually hid out in. It made me much more emotional to go through the house than I anticipated but it was beautiful and a once in a life time experience. I don’t think I could do that again. We then split from the boys and Libby and I decided to take the Red Light District Night Tour with the same tour guide from earlier in the day. I feel like I know so much about Dutch prostitutes now, haha. I love it. There are elite areas where the girls are prettier and sex shows with live porno, and it costs around €50 for 15 minutes “one blowjob and one quick fuck…” it’s all so ridiculous. The best part of the whole thing is the Dutch attitude towards the whole thing. Financially they support it, and they think it’s absolutely normal and moral. The District is actually a really family friendly area, with preschools and churches around every corner.

We had a shot at the bar at the end of our tour, then met up with the boys. We stopped at a coffee shop so I could have a blunt (surprise, surprise, I was alone on this one) and I bought a muffin for the next day. Such good stuff! We had a couple of drinks on the streets, followed by a Belgium waffle and then made our way to a Jazz Club where we ran into the ONE other person we had met in Amsterdam- a boy from South Africa named Francois. Insane! We run into someone we “know” in every city we come to!

DAY 2 (13)

Second day in Amsterdam, and things are changing. The boys have been complaining (our of the blue I might add) that this trip was not going at all how they wanted it to be. We (Lib and I) have been practically leading the trip, making itineraries for the day and taking over maps etc and leading the way. Apparently the boys have no desire to go in as fast of a pace as we’ve been leading and they want to cut their sight seeing in half. I don’t understand why they made no attempt to let us know this before now, but they decided to tell us today that they will be splitting up from the two of us for the rest of the trip, and they are going to Prague before Munich to be a day behind us. How ridiculous! We planned this trip together for a reason, so we wouldn’t be two girls alone in Europe, and we could feel safe. At this point we’re so pissed, that traveling with them will be a bad idea, so we decided to take a few days apart- they’ll go to Prague and Munich and we’ll go to Berlin and Luzerne, and we can all meet back up in Interlaken. New plan, new day.

So Libby and I took off on our own today. We started the day in Amsterdam at the Van Gogh Museum to see how his work was influenced by his environments, illness and how his work has influences future artists. I love the man, I can’t help it. We then decided to spend the rest of the day in a neighboring city. We had seen enough of Amsterdam and we really wanted a relaxing day chilling out on the country side- tulips and windmills ideal. After asking around for some tips, we learned that tulip season had passed, but there was a city nearby that had beautiful windmills on the water side- it was a small town called Zaans Schans. We were hoping to find a hostel to crash in once we got there and make it back to Amsterdam train station in the morning in time to take our train to Berlin, so we dropped off our luggage in a luggage locker in the Amsterdam train station and set off.

Thirty minutes on a train, plus eating my delicious brownie, and we arrived at our destination: Zaans Schans. You could tell from our first conversation with the clerk at the help desk that we were up for a new adventure. When we asked where we could find a hostel, she laughed and suggested we tried the only hotel in town, a few blocks away from the station. We walked over, nervous, but sure we would be lucky, until we heard a loud bass sound coming from an SUV following us. We tried to ignore the slow driving car as it turned with every move we made until the driver (a 5’2’’, small Indian man with Armani Exchange clothing) pulled over and got out of the car to talk to us. He mentioned the hotel might be sold out, and offered to have us stay at his place. He owned an Indian restaurant (which he gave us a flyer for) that had an extra bedroom on the second floor. We thanked him, but laughed it off, scared of what a night in this man’s house might be. When we finally got the “hotel” (after walking past a multitude of wandering goats and smelling the warm scent of chocolate from an old chocolate factory in town) we realized that it was a five star resort on the waterfront, rather than an affordable hostel we could manage to stay yet. 

At this point, it is still early afternoon (around 1:30 pm) and we were ready to see what the town had to offer before hopping to another bigger town nearby to find housing for the night. We took a ferry to a smaller island off the shore where locals dressed in period garb and small shops taught you how to make old clogs, coo-coo clocks and other Amsterdam-y things. It was beautiful, and we even got to see a few windmills of our own, along with some delicious off the farm ice cream, which was only made better by the delicious high I was still on from the brownie that morning. Once we were through seeing all there was to see, we headed back to the train station to catch the next train off to Harlem, the largest city in the Netherlands which we were guaranteed to find a room.

We arrived around 6:30 pm and decided that our first step was to find a room, and settle before it was too late. We found the name and address of a hostel in our guidebook, and felt lucky it had directions on how to get there from the train station on the bus. Once out of the station, we found out the buses were on strike, so we asked a bus driver for walking directions on how to get there. He said it would take about 15 minutes and drew us a path on his map, problem was he wasn’t going to let us keep it. Even bigger problem was that the 15 minutes he was talking about was a 15-minute drive down the highway. We learned the wrong way as we walked for over 3 hours to reach this hostel. When we arrived, we learned that not only was the hostel full, but all of the hotels in town were booked because of a comic book convention was in town. At that point we were ready to pass out and cry. It was 10:00 pm and we had been walking all day without any luck of where to stay the night. After begging the concierge to let us stay on the couches in the lobby, he told us there was another hotel 15 minutes away that had empty rooms. He guaranteed it was a 15 minute walk (not drive) and that he had called ahead and made sure they had rooms available. We walked and upon arrival to this 5 star hotel ($300 a night), we remembered that we had to make it back to the train station in time to take the train back to Amsterdam and then to Berlin. LIFE SHATTERING MOMENT. 

When the guy at the hotel bar heard our story, he offered to have us sleep in and he would drive us to the station the next morning. HALLELUJAH!! When we saw the beautiful shower, and the king size bed and the McDonald’s across the street (we were starving by this point) we thought we were in heaven- but even still, all we managed to do was pass out in our clothes and luckily wake up in the morning to get our ride to the station. Thanks for deserting us boys, this is how adventures get made!