Blogs from North Holland, Netherlands, Europe - page 206

Bikes bikes everywhere. Perhaps this is the reason why the Dutch are so slim, and we in North America…are so not. Bicycles seem to outnumber the cars on the roads. Why not? Holland is a flat country rendering it ideal for biking, and the Dutch sure take full advantage of this fact in their infrastructure planning. There are designated “bike-only” along every street, and many streets in the city center are only accessible by bike or foot. Boys, girls, jeans, mini-skirts, pregnant mothers, grandfathers, and families - they all rode their bikes! That morning I visited the Van Gogh Museum; the other, larger and more comprehensive, museum was called the Rijksmuseum and housed famous works by Vermeer and Rembrandt. I could only see one however so I choose the former. At first, Van Gogh’s brush strokes ... read more

Welkom in Nederland! I arrived in Amsterdam on June 13 and stayed for 3 nights before travelling to Hogeveen in the north of Holland to visit relatives. I stayed in a hostel in the old part of Amsterdam near the red light district, which makes for an interesting night life. It was quite an eye opener the first night I wandered around even though I knew what to expect. The old part of Amsterdam is pretty fascinating with the narrow streets and canals cross crossing all over the place. All the streets converge towards Central Station which is a pretty impressive building in itself. It was pretty fun and interesting but now I've moved on to see the "real" Holland. More to come...... read more

June 9, 2005 Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean… I guess you could say I had my first special moment, I woke up, the plane was very quiet and the sun was rising in all its crimson and yellow rays, over the ocean. I was listening to Bob Marley on the Ipod and it hit me what a journey this was. It actually brought tears to my eyes. The song was “Every little thing gonna be alright”… Michael Cox, I thought about you and your love for Bob Marley. And then the next song was U-2’s One which is the theme song for the ONE Campaign… DATA campaign ending World Hunger, Poverty and HIV. For those that don’t know about Bono’s campaign please go to the www.one.org or www.data.org site. They have helped me with this trip ... read more

I convinced Andy to go and see Ann Frank's house this morning. I went there the day before yesterday and recommended all the boys see it. Well, Andy tends to be the only one who gets up before 10:00am on a regular basis. So he met me at my hostel and didn't even have to wait in the usual hour and a half line. He walked right in and met me afterwards to walk around the city and snap a few photos. We went to a juiceshop this morning and had some wonderful smoothies with fresh fruit and banana bread. The Dutch are some what of health nuts and so it is not hard to find good food around these parts. Last night we ate at a great Italian bistro on one of the canals while ... read more

Given the vast amounts of hate mail/get to the point man messages I've gotten; instead of doing a day by day account of each beer sipped and each cigarette Sung smoked, here are the remaining highlights from our time in Amsterdam. Heineken Brewery Tour After prefunking at another bier cafe (I loved that we prefunked on our way to a brewery tour) we headed with John and Jill to the Heineken factory for a self guided tour and the grand pay off: According to Sung, we'd have 1 hour to drink all the Heineken we could consume. Oh joy of joys! The tour itself was rather underwhelming. Basically if you've seen the intro to Laverne and Shirley you've seen most of the tour... add a few stale beer making exhibits plus some skunky smelling furniture and ... read more