The Place Where the Pennsylvania Dutch Are Not From
Thursday , 25, August 2011 Europe 2011 3 CommentsI’m now writing from the comfort of my local coffee shop in DC. When I say coffeeshop, I mean a place where they sell coffee and baked goods. This is distinct from the meaning of coffee shop in Amsterdam, which is annoying. Seriously, when you just want a cup of coffee and maybe a croissant, you can go pretty much anywhere but a coffee shop.
I went to the Netherlands on Sunday morning. I had to take several trains, and I got on the wrong train two times, so what should have been a 4 hour journey turned into almost 5 hours. Which is to say, travelling by train in the Netherlands is quite nice, even when you’re a sleepy idiot.
I was planning on going to a music fest to see my friends perform, so I got to this little town, then took a bus to the festival grounds. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a place to put my luggage (of course- why would there be?) so I went back to town to see if the train station had lockers. It didn’t, because it was a tiny little town. So I didn’t get to go to the festival, but I actually had a pleasant time in this little town, just wandering around, looking at more old stuff, etc. Sunday night I went to Amersfoort, which seems to be a cute little suburb of Amsterdam. Really nice. Man, do they love their bikes. I should have gone to Amsterdam that night, but I wasn’t eager to get back into a crazy big city again, so I just spent another day relaxing. It was pleasant, and it got me nice and relaxed for a day in Amsterdam.
And Amsterdam. Very pretty city, but… well, as I mentioned the other day, Amsterdam… well, I don’t know.
it’s very tourist friendly, especially if the tourists want to spend a lot on hotels/hostels, or smoke weed, etc.. but.. well, I guess I wasn’t as stoked on it as I might have been. Maybe I should have visited it at the start of my trip, but I was pretty much over slowly walking through crowded streets, etc. Etc, etc, etc. So I’ll have to go back to Amsterdam sometime when I’m not already kinda done with travelling. I slept at a hostel, nice except for its disgusting bathrooms, got up at 4 something on Wednesday morning and left.
Eric Janssen says: Hey there Brett,
Nice to see a blog about Holland too! Good to read you went to some other place than Amsterdam. If Amsterdam is the only place you visit as a tourist, you have a wrong general impression of the country, if I may say so as a Dutchman.
Expensive hotels in Amsterdam, yeap that’s definitely true. That’s why it’s better to stay in hotels outside Amsterdam, the places you could refer to as suburbs. By the way, Amersfoort is NOT a suburb 😛 We don’t have that much room to put our cities on, for us they are complete different cities 😛 Not like America with their 1000km² big cities!
To make you stop wondering: Those houseboats mostly aren’t mobile at all. Most of them stay at their spot and never move, simply because most are not designed for mobility.
And well, considering the fact that basically all dutchies have 1 or more bikes, maybe you can imagine why we have bike-only parking-garages! I for example already have 3 bikes myself, don’t ask…
Oh ye, and that windmill is located in Harderwijk, mind the spelling that is not like the finnish look-a-like that you typed 😉
I hope I’ll see some blog about you visiting some other parts of Holland one day!
Cheers,
Eric Janssen (The chickenpox guy…)
Sorry about calling Amersfoort a suburb and misspelling Harderwijk… I have a huge mental block with how to spell the name of that town. I did like the Netherlands a lot, I hope to go back sometime soon and spend more than a couple exhausted days. Seems like a national bike tour would be a good way to see it.
Eric Janssen says: Yes, a bike tour is definitely worth it, if you like touring like that ofcourse. If you go back, be sure to check out the Amsterdam Zoo, called Artis, it’s a pretty big and nice zoo. Also if you want to learn about the dutch history you should go to Arnhem, there they have what we call, the Openlucht Museum, which is a massive open-air museum with old buildings from all over holland that they rebuild in the park. Basically they build it so that it’s a small town from history. If you go in the summerseason, you will also see people actually working like blacksmiths and such, which are more than happy to try to explain things in English. Also, most informationboards about the houses there are multilingual 😉 definitely doable for an American 😉
If you visit Holland and you are around Arnhem in one of the weekends, gimme a post on facebook or something, I’ll gladly show you around in the museum and the town + surroundings.
And don’t worry about the misspelling and suburb thingie 😉