It's time to decide what I'm doing tonight -- staying in Amsterdam or taking a train to Hamburg or Hannover this evening. Or taking a longer journey to Berlin in the morning. Berlin more likely. Two and a half days there followed by two days and a morning in Munich. The girls at hostel reception can't really advise me on this so I decide to go to the train station and ask for advice there.
But first, I rent a bike.
Very heavy but in a comfortable sort of way. No shock absorbers but it feels very "spongy" and very hard to do a track stand on, though I try at every red light I stop at.
Bicycle park outside the railway station. Note the raised parking area in the distant background. But this wasn't all of it. It wasn't even half of it.
The lady (wo)manning the information counter at the train station agrees with my proposed plan and sells me a ticket to Berlin the next day. She can't sell me the ticket from Berlin to Munich from her system so tells me to buy it online. Grumble, grumble (though I later find out that the price she quotes me is far above the price I am offered online, so all's well that ends well).
I leave the station and, it being early on a Sunday and not having a plan myself, I allow myself to get lost. Or rather, I try to get lost. It's hard to! People need to stop making snide remarks about Singapore being a small place because if Amsterdam is the prototypical European city, it's tiny. I always know where I am in relation to my hostel, the city centre, the train station... everything. Still, I do get to some non-touristy residential areas. Few people are about, allowing me to pretend that the city has been created purely for the pleasure of my exploration. Nice.
I'm in the bicycle lane coming up to a red and there's this little, er, vehicle stopped in front of me. "Car" would be too grand a word. It looks like it would get blown over if I sneezed delicately.
I'm not yet used to the cold and it's hard to balance my cycling effort between generating body heat and not going so fast that the wind freezes me. I resort to shifting to a low gear and pedalling at a high-ish cadence.
Wow, my hangnails don't hurt any more! I'd thought they'd hurt much more here than in Singapore because of the cold and dryness.
I'm sharing my room in the hostel with a young Japanese guy called Yudai plus two girls, one Japanese, the other German. They've deserted him this morning to go boating so he and I decide to go to the Erotic Museum together.
You see here that girls visit it too. In fact, it was the ladies at the hostel reception who recommended it to me!
The museum is quite ridiculous and I actually burst out laughing at some of the exhibits.
When we're done with that, I want to visit a brewery that I was recommended. Not the well-known Heineken brewery, which I'm told is all commercial and full of tourists. We find our way instead to yummy-yum-yum beer at the Brouwerij Ij (or Ij Brewery, the Ij, pronounced "eye", being the river by which the brewery is located). The cheese is so-so but I know to expect that.
Yudai felt he had to pose. Thank goodness he didn't make a V sign!
We chomp and slurp away and I note down the names of everything we eat and drink: abdikaas, salami, ossenworst (2), skeapsrond and pindas to eat; Ij Wit, Columbus and Paasij beers for me; Plzen, Zatte and Ij Wit for Yudai. No tourist bikes parked outside the brewery. This place is for the locals. Everyone is speaking Dutch too, even to us. Good choice. The mark of a welcoming country is when people speak to you in the local language even when you look foreign, I say to myself. Such profundities only occur to one after a few tipples.
Yudai and I get chatting and I find out that he's just finishing his undergrad degree. He asks me whether I'm 25. Sweet boy. Heh.
We like the ossenworst so much that we decide to go looking for the ossenworst shop after getting the address from the brewery staff. It turns out to be closed. Oh, well. At least we manage to see bits of Amsterdam we wouldn't otherwise have seen. But we still don't get lost!
Later that night, I'm still a little jet-lagged and hit the sack early. Our room has a minor toilet mishap and the German Everygirl in my room -- she said so herself; Anna Müller is supposedly the commonest name in Germany -- calls down to the reception staff for help. Nice chap comes up, very sociable and talkative. We ask him his name but before he tells us, he says it's pointless introducing himself because no one can say his name. We press him anyway and when we repeat after him, he says that I'm the first foreigner ever who's said his name correctly on the first try! He's not as satisfied with Anna's pronunciation (which is strange, considering she's from the country next door). I magnanimously begin to teach her how to say it but our new friend tells us that I've got it wrong now. So much for that.
After he leaves, I have my first proper chat with Anna. She's a master's student in anthroplogy so we talk a little about its different schools of inquiry. I find out that she's quite the traveller. She met Yudai and Yui the Japanese girl in Turkey, which isn't so unusual perhaps, but she's also lived and worked in Fiji, which is. Interesting girl but I'm fading quickly. Time for bed and off to Germany tomorrow!
More pictures here (no captions, free to access) or here (with captions but requires Facebook log-in).
This post is the second in a series. The full series:
Comments