First Stop: Amsterdam

After a very long flight and not very much sleep I finally arrived at my first ever overseas airport. The agent that helped me book my flights had assured me that Amsterdam was an extremely user-friendly airport, which was a big part of my layover decision process, but if this is an easy one I would hate to see what a complicated one is like.
I had a full 12 hour day to explore the city that ended up being a series of mishaps that somehow shaped themselves into a pretty decent day. I guess that’s how traveling alone in new cities tends to go. I fumbled my way through the shopping mall that serves as the Amsterdam airport to retrieve and re-check my luggage and then with the help of some extremely friendly cashiers found my way onto the train to Amsterdam city center. Two things about this – 1) I don’t know what I’m going to do the first time I go to a country where everyone doesn’t speak English as one of their languages. I feel really incompetent as an American in the fact that the only fluency that is mandatory or even that we have the opportunity to be adequately prepared for is English. At the same time I guess it’s not feasible to know every language, but still. 2) Even though I was again assured that the train system was very easy to figure out, I’m pretty sure that I did it wrong. Along with that, no one ever checked my ticket. I bought a round-trip ticket from the airport to the city and back, but no one even walked through the train cars to see if people had paid. I couldn’t figure out if they’re just really trusting in the Netherlands or if there was more to it than what I was doing.
My original plan had been to rent a bicycle when I got to the city and explore for awhile. In the interest of time and at the suggestion of my mom, I decided that there may be better ways to see the main parts of the city on a condensed timeline. Since it was my first time in the city I also decided that I was justified in doing some of the more touristy things. I did a boat tour of the canals that was really great. Unfortunately, the batteries that I had thought were new and put in my camera were actually completely dead, so I didn’t get any pictures of the majority of the city. After the tour I bought some new batteries (there are these stores called HEMA all over the place, I think I like them) and then set out on foot to see some parts of the inner city. Observations of note: 1) BICYCLES EVERYWHERE. Seriously, Seattle is nothing. If you check out my picture stream there was literally a multi-story parking garage full of nothing but bikes. 2) No public drinking fountains. Anywhere. Even the train station. It was kind of bizarre. 3) When I’ve heard people talk about Amsterdam, I always thought the whole café thing was kind of a joke, or that they at least weren’t that prevalent. It’s not, and they are. Just right in the middle of the city. I was a little bit shocked.
Side story - I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the Dutch language, but I’m not at all. I told my niece I would get her a book in Amsterdam, figuring they might have some cute traditional series that everyone growing up in the Netherlands reads translated into English. The first book that I picked up I could have sworn that the printer had malfunctioned. I quickly gained an appreciation for the language that I was hearing swirling around me.
Now I’ve come back to the airport and am waiting for my final flight of this series to take me to Israel. As a whole, Amsterdam is somewhere that I definitely would like to come back to sometime, but I think that I would enjoy it more if I had some company to trek around with.