Well I spent the last day of Amsterdam down in Den Haag (about 40 minute train ride out of the Dam), their parliament district. It was pretty cool, and after wandering around a bit, I found myself in an old castle like district, and after asking an old lady selling tourist junk what it was, she informed me that it was in fact the parliament building itself! Pretty cool that they do parliament in a castle.
I then went to the MC Escher museum (the prime reason I went to Den Haag) and it was great! Heaps of different Escher drawings (or I should say prints, as most of the stuff he did was either wood carved or lithographed. He figured he´d be able to distribute more works that way. Fair call really!) that I´d never seen before. Also an optical illusion that you could walk into and a virtual reality experience where you got to walk around inside various Escher kept me there for a fair while!
I trained it back to Amsterdam, picked up my bag and got on a train to Antwerp. If I´d done a bit more research I´d have taken my bag with me to Den Haag and left from there, as it turns out Den Haag is directly on the way to Belgium.
All in all Amsterdam was pretty good. There are about 600 coffeeshops, all the hostels were basically massive stoner dens, and the red light district is something different. They seem to group the prostitutes into whatever your fancy might be. There seemed to be an area for the young white chicks, another for the more mature and exotic flavour, but there´s probably not as many as you might expect for a city famed for this profession.
Just as I had worked out navigation of the place (I got lost several times each day) it seems I need to move on. I´m in Antwerp now, and it seems pretty cool, if a bit quiet compared to the Dam. My hostel here has 3 people that I´ve seen. One guy is living here for a couple weeks waiting for his apartment to be ready. Apparently had a fight with his girlfriend and had to move out. The other guy is a Japanese tourist who took a photo of me and the other guy eating breakfast, gave us a thumbs up and scurried out the door. He´ll be in his element here, there´s a lot to photograph. I haven´t been able to upload any of mine, the few internet cafes Ive used so far dont have USB enabled, so stay tuned on that front. This particular cafe has a keyboard layout I´ve never seen. They keys are all over the shop, and you need to press shift to use the numbers rather than vice versa. It should have taken me about 5-10 minutes to type this out, its been close to double that.
Anyway I´m off to wander a bit more and find some of these hundreds of Belgian beers!
5 comments:
Chimay Tripel! It's so easy to drink and knocks you sideways. Tho after your going away shindig, i'm not sure its good to get you too drunk in a city of strangers!
Yeh, gotta be careful about that! I´ve tried a couple over the last few hours. A pint of something pale which was delicious! The last was some 9% thing which wasn´t as nice (still good though), but has some kick!
Chimay Tripel is fairly powerful beer and one of the few belgian beers i've actually had, though im sure there's much better beers around there. That Escher thing sounds pretty cool - especially the 'virtual' thing.
- Andre
That sounds like a french keyboard mate.. you can change that where it says "FR" in the system bar to "EN".
Oh my god Seth, thank you! Thank you so much, I can type again....
Only problem is I've started to get used to the other style, argh!
cheers though, it's flooding back quite quickly :)
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