January 29- Today was the second day of being in Amsterdam. So of course we wanted to do some exploring. Uko and Jane Zylstra helped us get our bearings around Amsterdam a little bit and also the public transit system. We took the tram to the Concertebouwe stop and walked around for a little bit. The Concertebouwe, or concert hall was a very impressive looking building, with a cool looking exterior. The Van Gogh museum is also located right at that stop. Also in the distance the Rijksmuseum was clearly visible.
That building was huge and looked like a palace, but it wasn’t. We then went to the Albert Cuyp Street Market. The street market had a lot of open aired fruit and vegetables stands, cheese stands, and also clothing stands.
It also had a lot of other random shops. The prices are generally cheap, especially the fruit. The entire market stretched for a couple of blocks and took a long time to walk through the whole market. Later we explored downtown Amsterdam more. We continued to take the tram further into the city. We really had no plan on where we were going, we just wanted to walk around and see new sights. Earlier we received our Museumkaarts which allows us to get into various museums and other major sights around the city and country for free. These cards work wonders and are awesome! Because we all had these cards, we decided to visit the Royal Palace. The palace looked very lame from the outside because it was under construction and had massive tarps and scaffolding on the building. The inside of the palace was quite impressive but also became tiring after a while because every room started to look the same.
Every room had a massive chandelier with gold everywhere and paintings on the wall. The center of the palace has a statue of Atlas on the wall and a huge map of the world on the floor. Unfortunately carpet was covering the map. The palace is located in Dam Square, which is basically the center of Amsterdam. There were a lot of street performers dressed up in various costumes.
There was a gorilla costume right outside the palace. From there we explored some of the side streets and saw familiar restaurants such as McDonalds, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
As we continued, the temperature kept decreasing until we could no longer stand the cold. At that moment a church was located right behind where we were standing. So we decided to go in just to warm up. Turns out a service was also about to start and we decided to stay. The church was a Catholic church called St. Nicholas Church and the service was in English. The service was very difficult to follow and the songs were very slow as every song was sung by a very beautiful sounding choir. The service was very interesting and I am glad we decided to stay. Plus now I can say I attended a Catholic service. Later we decided we needed to eat something. We stopped and got off the tram at a stop called Leidseplein.
We ate at an Irish pub called “Hole in the Wall.” I ordered a burger and that burger was one of the best tasting burgers I have ever had in my life. After we were finished, we were expecting the waiter to come and give us our checks, but he never did. Apparently Dutch culture is when people go out to restaurants, the main point is to talk to other people and not only to eat food. Americans are more used to going out to restaurants to eat and then leave once their food is finished. So the waiters put no pressure on anyone to leave once everyone’s food is gone. We then asked for our checks. Another small problem that we encountered was the tip. No one knew what to do for a tip so we ended up asking some guy who appeared to be on a date. Oops but we needed to know. He said that tips were included in the price of the food but we should also leave a small coin on the table also. So we all left 50 cents on the table and we were on our way.
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