The Netherlands

Germany is great and all but I really wanted to get out of the country so I rang up my best friend Gabby and told her that I needed to come visit her in the Netherlands. Gabby is studying abroad in Utrecht which is only a short distance from Amsterdam and about a 3 hour train ride from me. So I booked my train and left for the weekend.

I thought that The Netherlands would be really similar to Germany being that they are neighboring countries. It's not. I would to describe it as being Canada and Germany the US. The Netherlands is much smaller and obviously has a lot less rules than Germany. I got off of the bus and I'm pretty sure I saw more people riding bikes than I did walking. I got in at night so I couldn't really see any of the buildings around me but I could definitely feel the difference in atmosphere between the 2 countries.
I met up with Gabby at her quaint university and at around 12:30am we decided to go out dancing. Everyone rides their bike in the Netherlands so before I came Gabby rented me a bike so that we could ride around. So at 12:30 we rode our bikes to a club where me met up with some of her friends. It was fun riding my bike but I gained a new respect for the reliable subway system in Germany. After we had our fill of music and dancing we rode home and slept for a long time.

The next day we decided to go into Amsterdam. Gabby said that it would be better if we waited until mid-day to go because we'd be too tired if we spent the entire day there. We went to the train station booked a ticket and were in Amsterdam about a half of an hour later.

Amsterdam is an interesting city. Pretty much everything is legal there but it's no proverbial Sodom and Ghomorra. It's very clean and, like most of Europe, the people walking around are very fashionable. We tried to stray away from the typical tourist things to do because I told Gabby that I'd be coming back with my school in about a week and we'd probably be doing those kind of things so we leisurely walked through the city and took a canal tour. It was nice because I know when I go this weekend we'll be doing non-stop stuff.

After dinner Gabby wanted to take me to the Red Light District and then dancing (not in the same place). So we had a nice pizza dinner and then walked around the Red Light District for a bit and then went out dancing.
It seems like everywhere we go we meet Americans because in the club we met this girl from USC studying at the University of Amsterdam who happened to know a close friend of mine. The more I travel the more I feel the world is actually a lot smaller than I had originally thought.

We didn't get back to Utrecht until about 4am so we slept in again the next day. Gabby really hadn't been home in a lot of weeks so we spent a nice day riding our bikes around her city. Even in Utrecht they have canals so it was a welcome change from Germany, but again I like being home and was ready to use those good ol' subways so I left once again for Deutschland. Tomorrow I go back to Amsterdam and it will be interesting to see how different my experience is this weekend from the last.

P.S. I have a number of photo albums on picasa web. The url is: www.picasaweb.google.com/tderodeff for your viewing pleasure!