Amsterdam Day 2 & 3
The next day, we woke up early. In the hostel we had a very nice open bar breakfast. Wow, that was cool. As I wrote before, it was more like a hotel rather than any kind of hostel. We went to the city center again. We checked our options. Would it be logical to get an I amsterdam card and pay 33€ a day for it, or just to get an unlimited free for a day public transportation ticket. Later we decided to buy that card. Because we also wanted to visit a couple of museums there. Moreover, there is a free boat tour and free casino entrance was included. That was a rational decision I guess.
First we have visited a museum, well I do not remember its exact name right now but it was about modern art. And we didn’t understand shit there. There were some weird videos and photos all over and they just didn’t make any sense. For example there was this small room, inside there were just 4 small screens facing eachother. Each of them had a seperate colour as the background and nothing else, no sound, no motion whatsoever. The most weird part is: There were people waiting and looking at those screens for like 10 minutes. Are you kidding me?!?!
We visited another museum about Holland history. That was cool. There were tons of information about Holland and Amsterdam in their own histories. Lots of materials, maps, clothing and such. I guess we stayed there for almost about 2 hours. It totally worthed it.
The next stop was the famous Van Gogh Museum. To take pictures was forbidden and we just walked around. I read almost all the information written about Van Gogh. Opposite than what I’d had before in mind, he painted almost all his painting in like 8, 9 years. And maybe you’ve watched Friends, the episode where this enormous salesman comes into the flat of Joey & Chandler and catched Joey from his weak side. He asks “Do you know why Van Gogh cut his own ear?” And there was no answer there. I didn’t know that neither, but I luckily found that out. The reason behind this was he had some mental illnesses in the final years of his life.
We got out. There was a nice park out there. We saw the big sign of “I amsterdam”. There were lots of people around, who were trying to make funny pictures. We also wanted to do that. But there were really lots of people around. So we decided to come back very early the next day. We visited one or two more museum, which were not that interesting. At the same time we were seeing lots of souvenir shops everywhere around town. I wanted to but some T-Shirts, so I was memorizing the prices.
The Casino was waiting for us. We could feel that. The entrance was free, but there were some stupid security procedures that we had to go through, anyway we did that. Then for 15, 20 minutes we tried to get what was going on there. Surprisingly, it is exactly like the movies. People were smoking, with sad faces, losing, spending money. They risk huge amounts of money. Really! All I wanted to do in a casino was to play that machine with a stick on the side, the jackpot machine I guess. You could put € bills or casino coins. And I also wanted to have one of those bowls and carry them around and play with those coins. So we changed 5€ each to casino coins, and start looking for the machines. We did found them again. The casino was a strange place, even though it was quite small, all the corners looked alike, we had troubles finding the machines we had seen before. But after we had found the ones we wanted, I spent almost all of my coins in that kind of machines. And I time I won a small prize about 8, 10€. But Zukhov had much luck, he got his money back and could eat the dinner with the rest. (:
The boat trip was going to be our last attraction of the day. We knew till when they were open, so we went there just on time. We got a nice seat and view. In the boat they were telling stories in 4, 5 different languages. It was cool. It became all dark when we were flowing around, actually it was also rainy, which made it impossible to take fine photos. We did even see some boathouses which were really funny. People were just living there, eating, watching TV, taking a shower with the drapes wide open, and our boat made a small stop there just to make us able to see how they were living there.
The final stop: Coffeeshop. We grabbed two huge mugs full of Heineken. It tastes just fine. When we got out, we again walked out in the Red-Light District, but it was nothing like the day before. Not having that much fun like, didn’t make us stay there any longer. We went back to the hostel and had a small chat with the German guys as the last thing for the day.
The next morning, we went to that big sign of “I amsterdam” again and there was nobody there. We could take the exact pictures we wanted. Later we went to the souvenir shops and got our things. T-Shirts and some other stuff. And after doing some small shopping, some beer and something to eat, we got back to the station to head towards Utrecht… After all it was a really nice start to the country of tulips…
Buyruk Alparslan - September 07 - Balikesir / Turkey
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