Amsterdam Part Two- Museums and Pub Crawls

After a very fun but hectic first day in Amsterdam, I awoke on Saturday morning well rested and ready to see the city for all its worth. The day was to be a bit more structured then Friday, with plans to hit up the major museums during the day and go on an organized pub crawl at night. We headed to Museumplein where the two museums we wanted to see the most, the national Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum, were located. A few of us stopped to grab some coffee to make sure we enjoyed the museums to the fullest and then went to see the pretty pictures that crazy bastard Van Gogh painted.

I don’t pretend to have a very keen artistic eye, or interest for that matter, but I have always been a fan of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, with Van Gogh in particular being a favorite. While some people were disappointed that the museum did not have some his more famous works, which we will see in Paris I am sure, I still found the museum to be fascinating. Organized in a chronological manner, I was able to take my time and see how Van Gogh developed artistically as well as personally. From his early crude but intense portraits to his bright still lifes while happy in Arles to the dark, abstract work that revealed his troubled mind before his death, it was fascinating to be able to watch his personal progression through these priceless works.

I left the Van Gogh Museum feeling very cultured and was ready to take on the Rijksmuseum but I realized that we did not know exactly where the pub crawl was embarking from that night. So Chris and I set out for an Internet café, sure that if we wandered around for a few blocks for a little while we would find one. We were very wrong, apparently Internet cafes are a thing of the past in Amsterdam. Thankfully we remembered one of the coffee shops we had been to had computers and we were able to figure out the location of the pub crawl, sort of. This excursion took up more than an hour and the group had already left the Rijksmuseum at this point, luckily I will be back in a month with my parents and will get to see it then.

Although the weather had begun to turn a bit nasty we continued our exploration of the city. On our way to the National Monument, where the pub crawl meet up was located, we passed through Max Euweplein, a small but quirky garden populated with golden iguanas and across the street from a large colonnade bearing the inscription “Homo sapiens non urinat in ventum.” For those of you who do not speak Latin, that translates to “A wise man does not pee into the wind.” I don’t think there is an explanation for either of these things, the Dutch are just kind of weird.

At the National Monument, we met up with one of the organizers of the pub crawl and made our way to the first pub, which incidentally was right next door to the coffee shop where we looked up the location. Since we roll deep, we got pulled out of line by the manager and were let in without having to wait in line too long. At this point, the boozing commenced. We made our way to five bars and clubs in the area, having merry time throughout. I think the undisputed group favorite was the El Punto Latino. We arrived at this particular bar around 12:05 AM on July 4 and rounded up all the other Americans on the crawl and burst into a rousing chorus of the National Anthem followed with some USA! chants for good measure. By the end of the pub crawl we realized that pretty much every place played the same music, which was okay by us since these were some legit tunes, the highlights being We No Speak Americano and Alors On Danse.

Despite it being the 4^th of July, the next morning was not exactly a joyous occasion. We woke up 20 minutes before check out and had to rush to exit the hostel. Making matters worse I was confirmed in my suspicions that I had lost my wallet the night before. Still, the night before was awesome. I regret nothing.

All of us realized that this was the first 4^th of July we had spent outside of our glorious motherland so we decided to go see…windmills. Most of the group were well on the way to the windmills so a few stragglers and I were just going to meet them there. At this point everything we tried failed and it failed hard. The previous times we had taken the trains or trams, no one checked our tickets so we decided not to purchase any this time. They checked this time. We were able to avoid confrontation but did have to take the train all the way back to our original station to buy tickets, wasting well over an hour and pretty much nixing our chances of seeing the windmills.

With only a few hours before we had to take the train to the airport we needed something to do that was not too far away. Fatigue had set in at this point and no one really had any specific they wanted to do, so we wandered aimlessly for a while, getting lost once or twice in the process. We decided that it was probably best if we just head to the airport on the early side, just to be safe and because we didn’t really have much else to do. One of the lessons this trip taught me was the importance of return time on your last day. It either has to be early in the morning so you don’t waste time or late at night so you can still enjoy the entire day. Instead we left during late afternoon, leaving the day stuck as a middling ground of dull nothingness. Lesson learned. Another two-hour delay soured what was a fairly uneventful return trip to London and our Amsterdam experience was done. In spite of a few pitfalls and miscommunication, the trip was a resounding success in my eyes and I can’t wait to go back in a month.