Amsterdam Day 1
Again, a long long train ride. From Lyon to Amsterdam. It was too tiring and too long. The train, from Lyon to Brussels was really really crowded. I hate France one more time, in that train. Even though I made a reservation and I paid extra for that, it was no way near comfortable. There was just one really nice thing happened on that train. I met a very beautiful Dutch girl. Her name is Mara and she was having her holiday in Lyon, I guess, and was also practising her French. You know, it like there is a rule that every Dutch guy has to speak at least 3 languages. :p Yeah, so she was one of them. She was claiming that her French and German were just “a bit”. But I don’t think so, because she also told me that her English is also just “a bit”. But it was surely better than mine. So you can guess…
I was going to meet one of my Mexican friends from Furtwangen in Amsterdam and we were going to travel for the rest of the trip together. I arrived in Amsterdam like 6pm and he was going to arrive around 10, so I had 4 hours ahead of me. First, I decided to eat something. I again saw döner right outside the station. O thought that should be cheap, so I went there. There was something really surprising. Normally döner is known as something Turkish, right? And generally all the people working in döner shops are also Turks. But there, in Amsterdam, the situation was a little bit different. There were 2 black Dutch guys working in a döner shop. It was a real surprise for me. Anyway, I ate my doner and started discovering that beautiful city.
The first thing I realised about Amsterdam was, everything was so expensive than Germany, Italy and maybe also than France. For example, they do not include the very same things but just to have an idea: The Rome Pass costs 20€ and includes 3 days of public transport and such and for Amsterdam, the “I amsterdam” card costs 33€ for just 1 day. It includes a lot more free entries to museums and such but still. The food, the beverage were all more expensive.
Anyway, I got a town map, but later I decided just to walk around, in order to get acquinted with the neighbourhood. I walked through some highly-crowded streets, saw lots of souvenirs shops, nice short streets and just tourists, no Dutch people. I guess in high season, in Amsterdam, English is more spoken than Dutch. As I just mentioned above, almost every Dutch guy speaks, so there is definitely no problem for them.
It was coming to 10, so I went back to the train station to welcome Zukhov. He came from Bremen, where he met some of his friends. We decided to buy some sort of public transportation ticket, which we were able to use for a limited number of times. Then we went to find our hostel. Amsterdam was the only city that we couldn’t find any hosts from CS or HC. We knew it was a little bit outside the town. Well it was more like 25 minutes by bus. After we got on the bus, we asked the driver whether that was the right bus or not and we got the positive answer.
There was a list of the stops in the bus and we knew which bus stop we had to get off. And the driver was also anouncing the name of the bus stop at every single stop. But we didn’t see the bus stop. And after some time, we came to the final destination. The driver knew that we were tourists, so he was speaking English to us. We explained the situation briefly and he told us there was no problem. He could take us back with no further charge and he even offered to buy us some coffee. We were shocked, because that was a situation that you may never see neither in Mexico nor in Turkey. The regular bus driver doesn’t just speak English, his English was better than ours and he offered to buy us coffee. With just one word, wow!
Finally, we got to our hostel. It looked more like a hotel, first and it was. We thought we came to the wrong place, but we weren’t. We did our check-in and went up to our room. Normally in hostels there is always high security at the entrance. But this was something else. Later we found out that there are 2 extra beds in the room, so we normally can bring an extra person to the room and he/she may sleep for free. (: We didn’t know that, unfortunately. 
In the room there were two German, one American and one more guy from Far East. The German guys were from Hamburg and the American guy was from Minnesota. I tried to talk about Minnesota Timberwolves, but he was that much into NBA, so that talk was cut short.
That one Saturday night and we were in high season. So it was quite possible that the famoust Red Light District was on fire. So even though it was getting late, we went back to the city. I knew where it was, based on the brief tour I had made before. It was amazing! Indeed it was red all over the place. The girls/strippers were dancing in those big window/doors. Actually I have seen similar stuff also in Nürnberg, Hamburg, later in Brussels but I don’t know why here it is that famous. They had all kinds of women there, they wanted to make sure there is always a woman for every taste of men. I think they are quite successful in that.
After some more sightseeing we went back to the hostel. We had to pay extra, because they were night buses, but it was nothing too extreme. That was it for the day…
Buyruk Alparslan - September 07 - Balikesir / Turkey
Comments
Leave a Reply