Day 12: An afternoon in Amsterdam

Years ago, about a decade or so, I made a semi-serious attempt to teach myself German. I didn't get anywhere close to fluent, but I learned enough that the essence of the language made sense to me and I've retained a bare working knowledge of it to this day. And it's because of that, now that I'm finally in Germany — although there was Vienna about five years ago — that I feel comfortable ordering off the menu at McDonald's.

I was also focusing a little on learning the phonology and morphology of Dutch before I came here, but that clashed horribly in my head when I was looking at Swedish and Norwegian words. Every time I would say anything but "ha det bra!", I felt like people were looking at me like I was speaking with rocks in my mouth. Polish was easy because I developed a tongue for it when I was a kid, and so far, German's come the second most easily.

But being in a place like Amsterdam, there's almost no need to worry about not knowing any Dutch (although a "danke" is always appreciated). And really, with all the excitement going on, language is the least of anyone's worries.

I've never really understood the appeal of Vegas being an adult's playground. The strip is so brightly lit you never know what time it is, it's gaudy and cheap, anything that kills time costs oodles of money (and the buffets just leave you hurting), and sitting in front of a gambling machine for hours is, well, I can't actually think of many things less fun than that.

Amsterdam, though, that's a city you can have a bundle of fun in and hardly spend any money. My time being extremely limited, I had about 6 and a bit hours to see the city but that was more than enough time to:

hit up Captein & Co.

walk to the Rijksmuseum

check out the Anne Frank House and decide against using up at least an hour waiting in line

go to the Amsterdam Torture Museum instead (pretty cool!)

take a breather, charge my phone and have a Belgian beer at a cafe

get propositioned by the women in the windows in De Wallen

eat greasy fries and a bami puck (you'd rather not know what that else) at Vlaams Frites

In that time, I must have easily walked 8km and my feet are letting me know. I've also never faced cigarette cravings like I have here (except Krakow, perhaps), using my vaper for the first time in four nights. Amsterdam makes it easy to walk around and have fun in and tough to not smoke in and I'm awfully sorry to leave it behind, but I've got Rome in front of me and I'm excited about that.