Our visit to Amsterdam

The weekend of April 11th Pam and I went to Amsterdam. We were traveling with Melissa, an SAP colleague from the US also living in the Heidelberg area. We were meeting Pam Levine a former SAP colleague now working for Centacor and who was coming the for business but took advantage of the travel to spend the weekend there. Pam, Melissa and I drove to Frankfurt Airport and had a completely uneventful flight.
The Netherlands has an interesting topography. When coming into airports almost anywhere else you look down on fields and highways and roads and such, but what is striking about Amsterdam are the canals and the water. Dikes are clearly visible as well as the canals….and it is all very, very flat.
The airport in Amsterdam is very nice and very modern with great shopping. We took a taxi from the Airport to the hotel, The American Hotel. After checking in and getting to our room, Pam got a call from Pam, she was not going to be able to come, her trip had been canceled just that afternoon. She was supposed to be leaving at about the time she was calling.
We were all hungry and we all decided on sushi, we called for a taxi. We asked the driver for a recommendation and he took us to a very nice Japanese restaurant, it had it all, regular order of the menu Japanese, Hibachi made in front of you and Sushi. I have to say, the sushi was excellent, not a lot of variety, but the fish was fresh and tasty. By the time we finished dinner it was already getting pretty late, we took a cab back to the Hotel.
Saturday started a bit cool and rainy. None of us had ever been to Amsterdam and we had no idea what way to walk to get to anyplace we wanted to be. We crossed the canal and looked around, but it did not ‘feel’ right in that direction. We turned around and walked the other direction. After a very short walk we came to a Plaza and in a corner of the Plaza was a Sports bar that was advertising breakfast. We went in and it looked good, so we sat down. Pam and Melissa had these crepe like things with strawberries they had seen other diners eating and I had a breakfast of Eggs, Sausage, potatoes and coffee. It was all very good.
We did a lot of walking. Amsterdam is a beautiful city and very livable. The canals are the defining feature of Amsterdam. They are arranged in arcs around the center of the city and the streets on either side of the canals have the same name as the canal. Another defining feature of Amsterdam is the bicycles. There is a 4 story parking garage just for bicycles. Also, it is not uncommon to see two people on a bike, the passenger being seated behind the on a carry rack. At traffic lights the passenger would jump off and then jump back on after giving the driver a little push start. This is something you seldom see in Germany.
It turns out that we could easily have walked to the Sushi restaurant we had been to the night before. We walked by the Anne Frank house, but the line was quite long and we decided to wait until Sunday to stop there and to do it early before the line got too long.
After lunch we also walked through the red light district. It was both not as tacky as we expected and very sad. The smell of marijuana drifted out of the coffee shops as we walked by and as we walked down the main drag, you could see the women standing in the windows selling themselves. The openness that allows this kind of thing is refreshing, but at the same time it is pretty sad to see someone stoned out of their mind, nearly passed out or seeing someone who you suspect this is their lifestyle. And for the women in the window, is this a bottom for them? Do they really enjoy what they do? I would think that that there are some women for whom being a prostitute in that environment is a nice job. You have good healthcare and have a structure to work within and then there are those for who this is a last chance. They believe they do not have the skills or wherewithal to do anything else and this provides for them and their family.
Dinner Saturday evening was at an Indonesian restaurant. We sat upstairs. We had a nice view of the street and the apartments across the street as it was not that wide. None of us had ever eaten Indonesian food before and we decided to get a sampler platter which we all enjoyed. Our server was a guy in his early 20’s who was very affable and he told us quite a bit about his life and how he wound up in Amsterdam.
Sunday Pam and I went for breakfast and we went to the same sports bar for breakfast. We then went directly to the Anne Frank house, the day before it had a very long line which we were hoping to avoid this morning. There was a line when we got there, but not nearly has long as the day before. Having grown up hearing about Anne Frank and knowing that the house they hid in was a museum, I knew that it was something that I wanted to see, but it was not something that I felt like that I needed to see. So, I was happily surprised when I really enjoyed it. The presentation is well done and they give a good history of the time period.
After the visit to the house, Pam and I spent the rest of the day walking around Amsterdam, walking around in parts of Amsterdam which are more residential. The canals of Amsterdam are lined with house boats. Some of them are really quite elaborate, from what we could tell looking in from the outside.
After walking around for most of the day we collected our luggage and headed back to the airport to fly home. Amsterdam is a very nice city with a lot to offer both historically and culturally. It would definitely be a city that Pam and I could see living in.