Back to Amsterdam. My travelogue isn't going to be quite as detailed as my one for Ireland, since frankly, I didn't do a whole lot of stuff that lends itself well to detailed reporting. Most of what I did in Amsterdam involved just walking around, wandering into different parts of the city, and exploring, not visiting tourist sights (the only remotely touristy things I did were the museums and a canal cruise). Still, I'll try to give a sense of how my weekend went.

The weekend actually started Thursday night, when we boarded the bus. I mentioned before what an incredibly unpleasant experience an overnight bus ride is, so I'm not going to go into that again, but we did get to go on the Dover-Calais ferry in the middle of the night! Very cool (for me at least, since I love boats). I also got to see the White Cliffs of Dover, which are quite impressive, but since it was the middle of the night, no pictures. I'll have to try and get out there in the daytime at some point.

We (Emma, Andrea, Amanda, Nathan, and Kirsti) arrived in Amsterdam around 9 AM Friday, and we split up to try and find accommodation. Emma, Andrea, and myself ended up on the aforementioned houseboat on the northern side of the harbour, so to go back and forth between homebase and downtown, we had to take a ferry. As I've already pointed out, this was no hardship at all for me! Once we were settled, food was the second priority, so we began wandering in search of a café. Amsterdam's not short on cafés, so we found one quickly, had a leisurely brunch, and continued our wandering. We saw Dam Square and its surrounding buildings, walked for a while along some canals, and then split up for a couple of hours (Emma and Andrea headed back to the boat to get some sweaters, and I visited the Poezenboot). The afternoon consisted of more cafés, the Van Gogh museum (incredible!), and sitting in the sun. Lack of sleep and too much coffee makes the rest of the day a bit blurry in my mind, but I know the others must have been feeling the same because we had an early night.

Saturday was a beautiful day, and Emma and Andrea went for a bike ride in the country while I slept late and wandered some more. I did take a canal cruise to see the sights, which is a really lovely thing to do in Amsterdam, and then walked all around the city before meeting up for dinner. Andrea's friend Kirk, who's doing an exchange semester in Amsterdam, was our tour guide for the Sexmuseum and the Red Light District, which (by the way) is pretty overrated. If you're shocked by prostitutes in windows, the Red Light District will shock you, but I was expecting the girls to actually be doing things in their windows, which is not the case. They just stand there, looking bored, and occasionally wiggle. The Sexmuseum, however, is downright hilarious, and if vintage porn makes you giggle, you'll have a good time there. We had planned to go to a club and dance that night, but sleep won out again, and we woke up well-rested on Sunday.

Sunday was our day for even more wandering and a trip back to the Museum Quarter to see the Rijksmuseum. Unfortunately, most of it is closed for renovation at the moment, and only a tiny part of the collection is on display (this is the part that includes most of the stuff the tourists want to see, though). Since we didn't know how much of the museum was closed before we entered, we left feeling a bit ripped off, and headed back downtown for some shopping before we had to leave. There's a fantastic candy store on the Damrak, so we spent quite a lot of time and quite a lot of money there... we had to have munchies for the bus ride, after all.

We got home Monday morning around 7:30, and slept until it was time to go to Thanksgiving dinner at ISH. All in all, an excellent weekend, although I am definitely looking forward to a quiet weekend at home now!