Amsterdam I

On Wednesday, the 20th we went to Amsterdam. It's nothing like the rest of Holland, but it's something that everyone needs to do.

A'dam was bike madness. Signs are only a suggestion of direction, traffic lights mean that cars might be coming, and pedestrians are never safe. Outside of the Amsterdam train station was more bikes then I've ever seen: enough that they had to build a bike parking garage!

Canals were everywhere. In Amsterdam, no streets go straight, and getting where you want is never simple. We could never go to our destination - we always had to take the "accidental scenic route"...

Where we stayed was another story. We found a couch surfer on the out-skirts of A'dam, so we got off the train to meet him at the station. It was about 6:00p, and we walked away from the residential area, where he took us up to the front door of an office building. He pulled a key out of his pocket, and opened up the front door. It was abandoned. The actual building hadn't been used for a while, however he and 1 other person were living in it for next-to-free so that squatters couldn't lay claim to it. Despite the "sketch" factor, it was a really nice place to live - he claimed an entire floor to himself, and had a 360 degree view of the surrounding area since it was glass windows all the way around. Also, only the first floor had running water - so you had to take the elevator down to the first floor of a completely abandoned office building in the middle of the dark night if you wanted to go to the bathroom.