Amsterdam, Nord-Holland

---

Amsterdam was a trip. No pun intended. This place is like you are in a giant sized play place. There are millions of bikes around, lots of canals, city parks where people are tripping on shrooms and smoking or eating pot, tulips everywhere, boats, and lots and lots of drinking. My first night there, I had a bit of trouble (seems to be a theme for first days in new countries) where I was trying to find my hostel (Amsterdam Hostel Leidseplein) located on Korte Leidsedwarsstraat 79. So this was the first time I was trying to dissect compound words within words to understand what I was looking for. Since Leidsedwarstraat ends with "straat" it means street. So every time you run into a big word, you have to sit there and tear it apart to find out what you are looking for. Again, I have written directions and luckily meet a girl on the above ground trams that run around the city. She tells me what stop I need and I find my hostel very easily when compared to what I went through in Italy.

Now, I've been told some things about Amsterdam, but when I was walking to my hostel and saw a chick puking in the canal, then fall into the canal, I realized most of what I had heard was true. There were huge life size chess boards, huge outdoor parks, long bike trails, beautiful canals, and the bars didn't close. If the bar did close, you simply walked out, walked down one more street, and that bar would be open. There was always something to do, and things to see. I checked into the hostel, and I was rooming with this guy named Richard from England. We went on all the walking tours of Amsterdam, they told us about the history of Amsterdam, how it came to be, why they send over a million tulips, about the pot laws, and about the red light district. This is where more of my newly made friends Charles and MJ come in to play. Me and Richard were staying in the same room, and I think Charles was also staying at the same hostel on the same floor. This hostel was crazy. It had spiral staircases, short ceiling Our room that fit 4 people only had one outlet for electricity, no lockers, one sink, and no storage. The entire floor (all 26 of us) shared one single toilet and one single shower. Now here is where Brando and Taelyr come into the picture.

Taelyr is a trapeze artist from Las Vegas, and Brando, her friend, was just starting out his Eurotrip and had just arrived from Iceland. Me and Taeylor hit it off and met an entire futbol team from.. (crap forgot the country). They would stand outside the hostel and yell up to the windows. They would chant in some language and do their little sports thing. Me and Taelyr took pictures with them at one point, I'll have to dig that one up. So me, MJ, Brando, Charles, Taelyor and Richard all take off bar hopping one night. Taelyr had an ATM incident, and later an incident in Brussles in which Brando and her got separated. Backtrack--

. So one night, me, Charles, and MJ decide to hit up the Red-Light district. I don't know what was more funny, the fact that MJ kept walking into poles because he was staring at the girls, or the fact that the only thing bought in the Red Light District by our group was some Chinese food from a fast food place. Me and MJ went to a park a few days later and saw this performer lady singer who was really good. I saw pot shops, seed shops, museum of torture, museum of Sensi seeds, and lots of other museums.



I went to the Anne Frank Haus and heard the history of Anne Frank. I had only ever read the book in school so it was a huge refresher in history hearing about the Holocaust in the Netherlands. I also heard the history of the Tulip and the association with the Netherlands. The later part of the 20th century saw its share of odd financial bubbles. There was the real-estate bubble, the stock market bubbles, and the dot com bubble, just to name a few. In each instance of price inflation people paid exorbitant amounts for things that shouldn't have been worth anything like the going price. And each time people stood around afterwards and said “What were we thinking?”



One has to believe that the same thought occurred to the Dutch in the 17th century when they settled down after their bout with tulipomania, wherein the humble tulip bulb began to sell for prices to make New York Realtors blanch.

As much as the tulip is associated with Holland, it is not native there. Rather it was introduced in 1593 by a botanist named Carolus Clusius, who brought it from Constantinople. He planted a small garden, intending to research the plant for medicinal purposes. Had Clusius's neighbors been morally upright, the tulip might still be a rare exotic in the gardening world. Instead they broke into his garden and stole some of his bulbs in order to make some quick money, and in the process started the Dutch bulb trade.

Over the next several decades tulips became a fad among the rich of Holland, and prices began to mount. Soon even ordinary bulbs were selling for extraordinary prices, and the actually rare bulbs were astronomical. A single Viceroy tulip bulb would sell for 2500 florins a value roughly equivalent to $1,250 in current American dollars, while a rarer Semper Augustus bulb could easily go for twice that. One particularly amusing exchange showed the goods traded for one bulb – the lengthy list includes among other things: a bed, a complete suit of clothes, and a thousand pounds of cheese. At the height of the mania, in what seems a complete loss of sanity, the bulbs were deemed too valuable to risk planting by their (formerly) wealthy purchasers, and it became popular to display the plain ungrown bulbs. In at least one instance the plan for safety backfired when a visiting sailor mistook a tulip bulb for an onion, and proceeded to eat it for breakfast.

The height of the bubble was reached in the winter of 1636-37. Tulip traders were making (and losing) fortunes regularly. A good trader could earn up to 60,000 florins in a month-- approximately $61,710 adjusted to current U.S. dollars. With profits like those to be had, nothing local governments could do stopped the frenzy of trading. Then one day in Haarlem a buyer failed to show up and pay for his bulb purchase. The ensuing panic spread across Holland, and within days tulip bulbs were worth only a hundredth of their former prices. The tulip bubble had burst.

During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Princess Juliana and her daughters, then in exile, found shelter in Canada. Princess Margaret was even born in Ottawa, and the maternity ward was declared to be officially a temporary part of the Netherlands, so that the birth could formally be claimed to have occurred on Dutch territory.

Right after the war, the Netherlands begun sending tulips bulbs to Ottawa as an expression of their gratitude.





At this point, I happened to piss off some people. I got up early one day and was watching the only English channel (something about a pawn shop or selling/buying goods reality TV show). Me and Charles were watching it and eating lunch/dinner and more people came downstairs to use the common room. I had the remote and I was moving it out of sight so that I could continue to watch English television (selfish, I know, but I was homesick!) and I accidentally dropped the remote control and the channel switches to futbol. Every single person in that room was now glued to the TV and I couldn't change it back. (Stupid American Award)

---

Photos

Bar hopping
Yes, I shared the hat

DJ Tiesto
Just kidding, its wax, but cool