The 3 Rules of Amsterdam

 So class in N.I. ended on Friday, December 13^th, after taking one final exam for anatomy (which I aced), an exam for genetics (which was basically a final), and writing a 7 page paper for psychobiology on the methodology and ethics of animal testing. Basically, that was the only week I was stressed over school work the entire semester, which goes down as a success in my book for sure!

On the 14^th of December, Gavin and I travelled to Belfast in the afternoon and caught the last showing of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. I must say, we both thoroughly enjoyed it and agreed that it was better than the first one. I’m not sure that was the fault of any directors or actors, but more so of Tolkien just having better adventure scenes further along in the story. It was also cool that James Nesbit has a key role in the film, considering I met him in Belfast at the beginning of the semester.

We then tried to sleep in the Belfast airport until our flight to Amsterdam at 7:00 in the morning; tried being the key word there. When they finally opened security, we sat in Starbucks for a while where I snapped some lovely pictures of Gavin in his natural state before we promptly boarded the plane and slept the entire 50 minute journey. 

 

Then running on less than an hour of sleep (and me less than that due to late night essay writing), we arrived to a full day in the crazy, wonderful Amsterdam, Netherlands!

A funny story from the plane: A group of Irish women were also flying from Belfast to Amsterdam, and I think it was one of their 30^th birthdays since the flight attendant announced that. They talked, actually more like screamed, the ENTIRE flight back and forth across the aisles to each other. Then when we landed one of them screamed “ARE WE IN AMSTERDAM?! I ONLY BROUGHT BIKINIS TO WEAR IN THE ISLANDS! WHO BROUGHT ME HERE?!” She then proceeded to interrogate a Dutch man beside her about how to say key phrases in Dutch, like hello and thank you. When he told her how to say them, she promptly announced that his language was just totally weird and useless… and I thought Americans were bad.

So what was the first thing we did in the infamous Netherlands? Drink coffee, of course! No, actually we went to McDonalds. Then we drank coffee, then we wandered around aimlessly trying to get our bearings of the city layout. We found that it was somewhat easy to get lost there due to all of the canals looking pretty much the same to us.

 

We also found that the day was proceeding along the slowest time line possible since we started out around 8:30 a.m. So we spent some time on a bench, watched a swan in the canal with its little ugly ducklings, a pigeon who thought it would be nice to poop in front of us, an albino pigeon trying to blend in, and swarms of sea gulls landing on the boats.

Like all of the other European cities at this time, Amsterdam also had a nice Christmas market just off the main Dam Square; which is a square with a name that makes a lot of sense in a city with a name that makes a lot of sense. Amsterdam was formed when a dam was put in the river Anstel. Ansteldam… Amsterdam… Pretty close.

War Memorial

Royal Palace

Me posing for a picture while trying not to get hit by bicycles

We also found out that the local buildings, churches, beer breweries, etc. are all named very practically. The Dutch are very practical people. They have the Old Church, the New Church, the War Memorial, the Royal Palace, the Windmill Brewery, etc. and all of them are exactly what they say they are. They also ride bicycles. Lots and lots of bicycles, which is also very practical when you live in one of the flattest cities in Europe where the highest canal is only about 1.3 meters above sea level. I’m pretty sure their motto is “Keep it simple, stupid.”

BICYCLES

Old Church

By the time evening rolled around, we were really tired, so we booked a room at the White Tulip hostel, ate a waffle covered in chocolate and bananas, and passed out around 10 o’clock, which believe me, is really early. ;D

Now, we found in Sweden and other places that the best kept secrets of European cities are found within the free walking tours from hostels. The guides are all history buffs who live solely off of tourist tips, but they thoroughly enjoy their jobs, so you always get a great bucket of information about their city. (It also becomes the best way to know how to get from point A to point B when you are on your own later that night.) Our guide was Mark McDaid, and would you believe it, he was from Northern Ireland! It’s a small, small world, my friends.

Irish tour guide Mark

He was a very energetic little man who bounced around a lot while he spoke with his pinkish umbrella guiding the way. He taught us the following:

1. How the name Amsterdam came about.
2.  The red light district has been around for hundreds of years. It used to attract sailors, but the sailors were still Catholic and believed if they didn’t pay indulgences and confess sins after visiting a woman and a local pub, they would go to hell if their ship sank on the next voyage out.
3. The Old Church built many additions using indulgence money…
4. Catholics were once banned from the Netherlands, so they had secret churches.

Secret Catholic church

This is where the 3 rules of Amsterdam come into play. You are allowed to exist peacefully in Amsterdam if: 1) You are quiet, 2) You create no harm to others, and 3) You are good for business.

5. The Dutch have a phrase that means “looking through your fingers,” where we would say “turn a blind eye.”
6. The Dutch looked through their fingers at Catholics because they followed all three rules, especially the business one with all that indulgence money.
7. Marijuana is illegal in Amsterdam, but it follows the three rules, and is therefore kept around.
8. Prostitution was legalized in Amsterdam in 2000.
9. The Jewish sector that used to be a ghetto during the war was destroyed by the Amsterdam people themselves when the Jews were forced to camps and the city had its coldest winter on record. They even took the wooden poles that held up the foundations of the houses in the canals to burn for heat. This is the same reason that all of the trees in the city are relatively young.
10. In the 60’s, the Jewish sector became the playground for budding hippy architects, so it has a rather funky look to it today. They call it Lego Blocks on Acid.

11. Mark’s motto was “hear a bell, run like hell” meaning the bikes will run you down. He wasn’t kidding!
12. Capitalism was started in Amsterdam with the VoC company in 1606. Their building is now part of the University of Amsterdam. They were the ones who turned the swamp into the country of the Netherlands, which was once the most powerful city in the world. They created New York, New Zealand and a whole bunch of other places Mark listed whose names come from Dutch words or cities.
13. The Dutch once had a new king from France or somewhere. He learned Dutch in order to speak to his people, but the only phrase he learned was “I am your King.” Then the day he was going to announce this, he actually said “I am your rabbit” because the two words are similar in Dutch. He was known as the rabbit king.
14. The Dutch gave us cookies.
15. Every year, 20,000 bicycles are cleaned out of the canals.
16. The canals don’t smell because they are filtered every 3 days.
17. The Dutch LOVE ice skating, and when the canals freeze over, they skate to work! How cool is that?!
18. The houses are all wonky. They lean to the side and actually lean forward on purpose! Mark said it’s because their staircases are too narrow and when they move house they use a pulley system from the top window (every house has one), but it’s rather windy there, so when you start pulling things up to the windows to bring them in your sofa starts swaying in the breeze and breaks all the glass! So if your house leans forward, there is more space for the mattress, stove, or washing machine to swing without hitting anything. Simple, yet practical!

Pulley systems

Wonky windows and skinniest house

 19. Dutch staircases can also be called ladders because they are so steep and skinny.

20. There is a very humbling Pink Triangle Homosexual monument behind another church in the city, representing the pink triangles the gay people had to wear during the Holocaust.

21. Amsterdam was one of the first places to be okay with homosexuals. They really seem to accept everyone, actually. The whole place was just live and let live. It truly was refreshing to see such acceptance!

Other random facts I learned while there included:
Amsterdam is in the Netherlands, which is home to Dutch people and also known as Holland. I guess all of those labels were kind of jumbled in my head before.
The Red Light District is always open, no matter what time of day. This was one thing that truly disturbed me in my travels. I guess they make a decent living from prostitution being legal, but I felt bad for their quality of life. Gavin and I talked about how interesting it would be to give them all questionnaires on their psychological welfare.
The crime rate is actually very low there! I thought I might be at risk for kidnapping and God knows what else, but apparently their highest crime rate is from tax evasion. The next highest crime rate is illegal parking, which is saying something since hardly any of them actually drive cars!
Amsterdam dogs are all so tame that hardly any of them need leashes as they trot next to their owner’s bicycle.

After the walking tour, our next stop was a tour of the Ann Frank house. The experience was unreal. Standing in the same room she did. Looking at the wallpaper where they marked the children’s growth. Seeing the pictures Ann herself had glued to the walls. All of it was overwhelmingly sad, as we knew it would be, and I think we both left with a greater determination to keep such injustice from happening among us like that again. And yet, places like North Korea still exist and we find it relatively easy to push from our minds since they aren’t in the civilized Western Europe… just some food for thought that I have also been munching on lately.

Ann Frank house

I know I also said earlier that the tour helps you find your way around the city, but on that Sunday night, Gavin and I got pretty turned around. We bumbled our way around (but found out the next day we were only a block away from the hostel, it just looked different in the dark). We started the night with some coffee, then meandered into a McDonalds where we had another chocolate waffle and a milkshake, then some kebab for dinner, and finally wound up in a pub watching Australia’s version of Jersey Shore. I’m not sure if it was the typical Amsterdamian night life experience, but we had enough fun just wandering around without any particular place to go. 

On our last day there, Monday the 17^th, we visited the local, large flea market in Waterlooplein. It was a very interesting place where we probably would have spent a lot of money if we had had the capacity to bring it all back with us! There were quite a few Christmas presents bought, however. 

That evening, we decided to go to the Windmill Brewery (Brouwerij 't IJ in Dutch). We kind of got off the tram at the wrong stop, but it was okay because we saw some flamingos from the zoo on the way! It was kind of the most random thing that has possibly ever happened to me, to just come round a corner to a flock of flamingoes.

We missed the brewery tours for the day, which we regretted since the windmill is the only one still functioning with a purpose in the city. However, we weren’t all that sad since we did get to sample the different beers that they brew there.

Dinner that night was a pizza in an Argentinean grill where we were served Doritos instead of regular tortilla chips as an appetizer, and a very white, friendly cat came to visit our table inside the building. I’m not sure that would fly back in America, but I was quite okay with it!

On Tuesday morning, the day we were leaving anyway, I woke up in my top bunk of the hostel fearing for my life!          … Okay that might be an exaggeration. But I was still pretty certain that a drill was about to break through the plaster and possibly come straight through my skull as well! We had noticed that some construction was being done on the building, but that morning they decided to do some drilling opposite my bed before they started scraping and painting again. At least we were headed out to the airport fairly early anyway.

In hindsight, Amsterdam couldn’t have been any better than it was. Our only complaint was that every straw we tried to use there had at least one hole in it, or the end of it looked like a rabbit has chewed it off! If anyone can figure out why the Dutch fail at straws but succeed at most everything else, Gavin and I would like to know.

Time flies when you're having fun!

I sit here at 2:55 in the morning, high on life.  Don’t worry, I promise I’m not actually ‘high.’

Tonight was the last night at Kelly’s, the largest dance club in Northern Ireland, and the last night to be in Northern Ireland at all for a few of the internationals.  The nostalgia of the memories from the semester are starting to kick in, and it was painful tonight to realize these people will soon be out of my daily life.

 We also took a group picture today at 1:00 this afternoon. Even then, as I saw everyone coming in from different directions, it was impossible not to smile and feel the electricity of our friendships with each other. Of course with our large, crazy, clearly not Irish group, we attracted quite a bit of attention on the university steps, but I like to think it was because they were all envious that they didn’t get to know the coolest people in Ireland.

I haven’t filled in much since Thanksgiving time, so I have a lot to catch up on!

For Thanksgiving, we had a huge dinner organized by a few American students and the residential services of the school. The food was made by cooks from the university, but they had turkey, stuffing, ham, green bean casserole, sweet potato casserole, corn, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and all the rest. The only thing lacking was pumpkin pie. It was a great night of celebrating America and educating friends on how to cope with the inevitable food coma.

Everyone is quite confused as to why we make it so big, though. They all ask why it is so close to Christmas and I never know how to respond! I think the best part of the night was when Stan (Dutch) commented whole heartedly that the meal changed his opinion of America. He never thought of Americans as being good cooks, but we completely changed his mind! He was totally serious!

The second best part of the night was the music. The organizers of the dinner also booked two musical acts, and the second guy was just a solo guitar player/ singer. He could play just about anything we asked him to, from Billy Joel to Train. I am fairly certain he is the best guitar player I have ever seen.
We also got to play with bubble wrap after most people left for the evening…. That actually might have been my favorite part.

Ben and Peter

The only good pictures of Gavin had my head cut out, so I picked the nice picture of me!

Me, Victoria, Jenny and Kristin

I was also thankful on Thanksgiving to skype my family for the first time since I have been here! They were all at Grandmother’s house and Andrew was able to effortlessly connect me to the living room in Georgia. That absolutely made my night, getting to feel as if I were actually there with them in the comforts of home.

But as if the food coma hangover from Thursday wasn’t enough, Friday evening the international families put on an equally as big, but also much fancier, Christmas dinner! We had about the same food: turkey, ham, stuffing, potatoes, carrots, bread, etc. And good conversation with all of our Irish families. The other surprise of the night was that Victoria and I got up and sang. Linda Nevin (my Irish mother) asked if I would want to get a friend and sing a Christmas song for everyone that would represent Christmas in America to us, so we picked Winter Wonderland. Victoria’s Irish dad, Peter, is basically the Irish version of Teresa McCoy. He had the music and easily played the piano for us. I think it was a hit, but you’ll have to ask my friends for an honest answer!

THEN, as if we hadn’t had enough of the parties, that same Friday night we had a birthday party! But it wasn’t just any birthday party. The internationals rented out the night club in Portstewart called Havana to celebrate the 10 or so people who had their birthdays in November (aka The November Kids party). It actually turned into quite a fiasco because we were all supposed to have wrist bands to get in, yet they didn’t give the organizers enough of them to facilitate the international friends. Long story short, some people (including myself) didn’t get in at first because we didn’t have wrist bands. What ensued was a mad dash for one of the November Kids who could tell the bouncer that yes, we were supposed to be there. All in all it was a good night, even though it didn’t go as smoothly as planned.

Ballywatt Presbyterian Church, where I go with the Nevins.

So the next weekend, the 7^th of December, I went with the Nevins to see Oliver: The Musical with their son Christopher as Fagan and daughter Charis as one of Fagan’s gang. It was a marvelous school show with a fantastic cast and crew. It truly made me miss being either on the stage or in the orchestra, but I suppose “all the world is a stage” anyway, right Tomas Nevin?!

I spent the day with Linda and Thomas and all 6 of their children, 3 of them with their lovely spouses. I had to ask them what it’s like to grow up and have a family of your own, and then go visit your sibling and their family…… At this moment in time that seems like a very strange phenomenon. They simply said you don’t even realize it’s happening and it becomes normal quickly. I’m still fairly skeptical…

I also spent Sunday with the Nevins and that was truly a gift. Their home is so comforting, complete with a kitten, warm food, tea and biscuits, and a Christmas tree right next to the comfiest chair in all of Northern Ireland facing the magical, mindless television. Oh, what a great day of love and laughter!

Unfortunately, after a great Sunday my last week of Irish class has turned into a stressful one. I had my final exam for Anatomy and Physiology today (Wed. Dec. 11) at 2:30 (which I passed with flying colors), I have another Genetics exam tomorrow afternoon, and a final paper due on Friday (which I only have 300 words on). Somehow I have still managed to squeeze all the farewell parties in… but yes mother, I have still studied and feel fine about my test tomorrow.

Besides Kelly’s tonight, we also had a huge dinner cooked by Laura (a fellow American)! That reduced much of my stress because it was all homemade, southern, American food. Stan yet again said it changed his opinion of us even more for the better, and I must say the mac and cheese, fried chicken and potato salad were out of this world! It was quite a last supper.

My future plans now include traveling to Amsterdam in the Netherlands this Saturday with Gavin, then up to Edinburgh, Scotland to meet Dad and Andrew and maybe Brian, and back to Coleraine, N.I. with the family to show them the wonders of where I have been. Be on the lookout for the next travel blog, and people of America, be on the lookout for me on December 23^rd!

P.S. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was the best movie I have seen in a long time.

P.S.S. I really wanted to go to Germany before I left Europe, but actually it might be better this way because I will be forced to return and visit very soon.