First Round of Amsterdam Pictures

Hey everybody. Since I last emailed people, I have explored the city and started classes. I have to say that even though the weather has been terrible so far, Amsterdam is a fantastic city – weird as shit at times, but fantastic. Also, my classes are really interesting, and the faculty is impressive. On the first day, our guest speaker was Michael Kirby, a justice on the highest court in Australia. He talked about the law in Australia and how it compares to the rest of the world. He had some constructive criticism for the United States, but who doesn’t these days. One thing that I thought was really interesting was that the people of Australia amended their constitution to say that all judges must retire at the age of 70. The average age of our Supreme Court is 68 – Stevens, Scalia, Kennedy and Ginsburg wouldn’t be on the court, and Souter and Breyer would be retiring within two years.

Unfortunately, Justice Kirby did not say “bloomin’ onion” or “that’s not a knife; THIS is a knife”, even though we were all thinking it.

As I suspected would be the case, there are a lot of gay people in this program – probably about 75% of the program. And most of them are very gay. I’m talking I’ve-been-referred-to-as-“honey” gay. But most of them are really funny (I think you probably have to have a sense of humor to deal with being gay and living in the United States).

Last night was Euro Beer Night at the Ann T’ij, which is the bar in this complex where the students live. It had to be explained to me that in this context “Euro” was used to describe the cost of the beer, not the origin of the beer. Even with the conversion rate ($1.60), that’s a fantastic price for beer. And they don’t serve shitty beer here.

Couple of odds and ends before I get to my pictures:

-This morning on my way to class some weird dude tried o sell me ecstasy. It was 9:30 am. I don’t know if there is a right time to sell ecstasy, but that just struck me as odd. I didn’t buy it, by the way.

-On my way home from class, I heard a knock on a window, and I turned to find an attractive young woman wearing very little clothing waving me toward her establishment. I think she liked me! But I had to get back to my apartment to take a nap, so we didn’t get a chance to chat. Sadly, fate had brought us together, but I may never see her again…

-What was even funnier was that I walked a little further down the street, and I noticed this one relatively hefty lady in a window. However, she was sitting down and eating something from a Styrofoam plate. This raised questions in my mind, like ‘Is that part of her appeal?’ and ‘Doesn’t she get a lunch break?’

Anyways, here are pictures from my first round of sightseeing. Don’t expect any pictures of women dancing in windows in the red-light district, as apparently you’re not allowed to and it could get ugly if you do take pictures. It’s pretty tacky anyways.

This is my humble abode, or as the Dutch would call it Van Humblabodenrijkenvanderstraatweg:




If you notice in the picture of the shower stall, there is a drain stopper on the wall. That’s right, a drain stopper for this one-inch deep shower stall. I suppose it will come in handy when I want to fill my apartment up with water.

I like these exit signs because it’s not necessary to show a stick figure actively exiting the building in order to indicate an exit:

Here’s the housing from the outside:

You can see the boat that has been converted to housing in the background. If I showed up here, and they told me I’d be living on a boat, it would be cool for about two seconds, and then I’d say “This blows.”

This is the canal closest to where I live. It probably has a name, but I don’t know it:

This is an old church or something. But it’s not the famous “Oude kerke”:

The “don’t walk” lights, as you can see, are red lights of people standing still:

Maybe I’m analyzing this too much, but doesn’t that mean “don’t stand still”?

Getting closer to the center of the city:

Here’s something I wasn’t expecting to see in Amsterdam:

I don’t know what this building is, but there is a store on the first floor that sells Christian paraphernalia. Seeing this in Amsterdam sort of felt like seeing the food pyramid in McDonald’s – people have already arrived there with certain intentions, so what is the likelihood that you’re going to convince them of anything?

I don’t know if you can tell from this picture, but the buildings seriously lean in Amsterdam:

The one-way streets are really narrow. Sometimes you think you’re walking on a sidewalk, but then a car almost runs you over:

Speaking of which, pedestrians absolutely, unequivocally do not have the right of way in Amsterdam. You need to be alert or you will be run over by a bike.

Parallel parking is hard enough when shimmying up to a curb:

It must have happened that a car has fallen into a canal while trying to park.

More crooked alleyways:

I’m pretty sure this is graffiti and not something the University intended:

I think it looks sweet though.

The University of Amsterdam has this really cool courtyard in the middle of this part of campus:

For some reason, when I was in it, I felt like I was the son of an old aristocratic family, and I had been sent off to Amsterdam to become sophisticated in the arts and the great thinkers of our time. But then I thought ‘Nah, forget it; yo home to Bel Air!’

The mandatory canal shot:

Most of you already know that Amsterdam draws a distinction between “coffeehouses” and “coffeeshops”:

If you want some coffee, you go to a coffeehouse. Funny how there are significantly more coffeeshops than coffeehouses…

This is Amsterdam Centraal Station:

This is either graffiti from an 18th century cartographer, or it’s an advertisement for the Amsterdam Maritime Museum:

Well, that’s it for now. Of course, these pictures were just taken as I walked to campus for the first time, so obviously there is much more to see and take pictures of. I’ll try to be better at remembering my camera.

I'll post these pictures on Facebook if you'd like to see larger versions of them.