the white bike experiment and other things i learned in amsterdam.

so apparently amsterdam's the biking capital of the world. there are bike lanes everywhere and definitely more bikes than cars. it's amazing. back in the 1960s, when the world was all about free love and all that other stuff which seems to still be around in amsterdam, a fun-loving group of people/activists decided to put white bikes all around the city so that people could just pick them up and drop them off wherever. unfortunately, like the random acts of kindness group on penn's campus who put umbrellas in various locations when it'd rain, the program was unsuccessful--people stole the bikes.

i arrived in amsterdam on friday and hopped in a cab to the luxurious amstel hotel. the cab ride over consisted of the following songs on the radio: radio gaga (queen) and then a commercial with the cheers theme song sung in dutch. it was just sort of amusing. in france, i've learned, many american songs are translated into french because the law is that a certain amount of the music played on the radio each day be in french. i guess this isn't so weird when you think about the clearn channel bullshit that goes on on the radios here and the recent sony payola scandal. it's just a bit strange.

anyway, the cabride from the station was expensive (13.80 euros), and then dad and i ordered room service for dinner. sat we went to shul and met my cousin who's actually pretty cool and then went to the rijksmuseum to see the nightwatchers and other vermeer/rembrandt situations. then we walked around for a while, played some scrabble, and enjoyed the city. it's a wonderful city--the bikes are great, these beautiful canals with pretty canal houses alongside them, old streets. it's great.

last night we went to go see mrs and mrs smith (stupid). in the theater we got ben and jerry's which had clearly been defrosted and refrozen and dad said that i shouldn't eat it bc that's how you get sick--bacteria gets in when it's defrosted. priceless. then i went to a coffee shop that had internet. internet, beer, pot all at once. it's crazy that pot's legal here.

so today dad and i went for a bike ride all around the city after we went to breakfast at the american hotel, this art deco breakfast room. it was really nice to see the city that way and ride around, and go through the vondelpark--a really nice park. we walked around the red light district where prostitutes are in the windows--although it wasn't in full force because it was like 1 on a sunday. but it was crazy, they just stand in the window and hope to entice you. and at one point i stopped to wait for my dad in front of a window with a girl who was blonde and about my age (if not younger) and she finally banged on the window to tell me to get out of the way. apparently i was bad for business. dad didn't want to rent bikes at all at first, i think he was nervous about getting run over or something ridiculous. he was also pretty shaky on it in the beginning. then dad and i parted ways, and i took about a 3 hour walk around, got myself a little lost, and enjoyed it all.

my butt's sore from the bike, though.