Semana Santa Parte 1 - Amsterdam

The first stop for semana santa, which is what they call their spring break, was Amsterdam, Holland. About 7 of us total were meeting up all for the same 4 days there. Two flew from the States, one a boyfriend of one of the girls in our group, and the other a college friend of a guy from our group. We were spread out through Amsterdam in the hostels because we booked things at seperate times. Two of the guys, David and Pete, the ones who know eachother from school in the US, booked the first night before I could talk to them so I had my own place for the first night but stayed with them in a different hostel for the remaining three days. Two of the girls had a place farther down the canal together, and the couple had another place on the other side of the canal down a bit.

My phone couldn't make outgoing calls or send messages, one of the girls dropped her phone into the canal while the other didn't even bring hers, and the girlfriend from the couple ran out of minutes, all of this since the first day...


This is one of said canals that may contain our friend's phone. How beautiful. A side note: this was practically the only sunny day by the way for the rest of the spring break. The temperature at the time was probably about the low 50s, high 40s F from what I recall.


Therefore meeting up was a bit harder than expected and so for the first couple days it was each group on its own. The city was quite small so we ended up bumping into them anyways later on.




These are the stairs leading up to our room in the hostel. Now, normally I wouldn't post such a mundane detail but if you take note of the fact that im standing upright on one stair and pointing the camera at a direct line in front of me you'll realize these stairs incline at a ridiculous rate. It's hard to convey the experience through this photo but basically these are the narrowest and steepest stairs you'll probably run into in your travels. It was a lot of fun lugging a suitcase up.

And these are the luxurious quarters you get to stay in for about $50 american a night in the heart of Amsterdam. The shower in the bathroom was a spigot mounted on the wall and the drain was a hole in the corner. The floor was flat and there was no seperation nor partition between the shower space and the rest of the bathroom, so if you had to go to the bathroom after someone took a shower you best not be wearing pants or mind getting wet.

Here is a view of the street in front of our hostel. We used trams like you see pictured to get around the city, which was quite small anyway. I think we were supposed to pay for it but we kept hopping on the back and no one ever asked us anything. I used the weak dollar in the face of the euro as an anti-guilt remedy for that, that and being a poor college student.

The first day we spent getting our bearings and walking around the city. The people are quite friendly, and almost over-polite to an extent. Almost everyone we spoke to knew english perfectly as well. I read prior to coming here about the many canals of Amsterdam but had not expected there to be quite so many. This city reminded me of a northern european version of Venice to an extent.

On the second day we decided to go check out the Anne Frank house, as it was one of the big tourist things to do in the city. Pictured here is the bookcase which hid the entrance to the secret portion of the house where Anne Frank hid from the Nazis during her time there. To enter the room you step through a doorway not pictured.

This is where you come out to after going behind the bookcase. All over the walls and in various spots were sentences in English and Dutch taken from Anne's diary. The one over this doorway mentions her hearing over the radio about the Jews being gassed in the camps and how terrible she felt.

This is the view out the windows of the room Anne hid in. I took this picture to try to imagine what she saw every day as she hid and looked out this window, imagining how it felt to watch Nazi patrols march down the cobbled streets in search of more Jews to arrest. It was truly a sobering experience. Definately not the typical touristical jaunt through such a famous city. Not quite Disney.

After such a light hearted experience (sic) we decided we needed a few pints of fresh authentic dutch Heineken to un-sober ourselves after having experienced such a sobering sight, and walked to a nearby cafe.

The next day we decided to check out some of Van Gogh's and Rembrandt's works at this museum. They didn't allow pictures inside so this is as much as you'll see of this place right now. The interesting thing was this style of architecture was consistent throughout the city with the other important civil structures as well. The train station we emerged from on the first day was nearly as grand as this museum in its outer appearance.

Here is snapshot of the 'dam on our last night there. There are a lot of other things I could have taken photos of but did not want my camera with me at the time. We did take a stroll through the red light district and it was quite funny actually. You walk down streets and alleys lit up in red neon as girls in lingerie knock on the windows they stand behind as you pass. The whole experience of this city was quite surreal. The apparent unrestricted allowance of such hedonism would suggest this city would fall into utter chaos and ruin after a month but instead what you get is quite the social experiment in action that still continues on without a hitch. Not once did I feel threatened or unsafe, except for being paranoid about my camera, and I did not see anyone seemingly out of line. Everyone generally kept to themselves. Granted if you wanted trouble all you had to do was look for it and it wouldn't be far but at the same time trouble wasn' going to come find you, unlike other places I've seen.

The next morning I had to wake myself up to catch the bus to Paris, as my friend David was going to Ireland from Amsterdam by plane later in the evening and his friend had already left for his plane back to the States as I slept.