So Many Countries, So Little Time!: Copenhagen and Amsterdam

I'm finally getting around to posting more about my trip for the past month or so. I've been taking notes on my computer while I have free times on trains but somehow actually posting it has slipped through the cracks since I haven't spent much time online recently and when I have it's been for planning the next part of my journey. However, I was able to use a good computer to upload pictures to my blog the other day, so the next few posts will actually have pictures! So without further ado here is the first of the 3 posts I have written at this point.

After leaving Norway, my next stop was Copenhagen for a few days before meeting up with Danielle in Amsterdam. Copenhagen was another city sort of like Salzburg that I added to my itinerary mostly because it was easily accessible to where I was headed and I had a few days that I could add something when I was originally planning out my schedule. So I didn't know a whole lot about it or have many expectations about it (other than knowing people who had studied there and loved it), but it turned out to be a great experience. Instead of staying in a hostel, I was able to arrange to couchsurf with someone who lived there. I'm not sure if I have mentioned couchsurfing on this blog yet but for those who don't know, it's a website where you can meet hosts in the city you are traveling to who are willing to let you stay with them for free. This was my first time surfing (my roommates and I hosted once when I lived in Las Vegas) and it was great! My host's name was Morten and he lived in a small apartment about a 15 minute train ride from the center of the city. He was really nice and we had a lot of great conversations, and he even made me some Danish food. The first morning I was there he had to go take an exam, so I went into the city on my own and wandered around. I was surprised how easy it was to walk to pretty much anything in the center of the city so I saw a lot of the sights without having to worry too much about where I was walking or getting lost.

Then I went back to Morten's place to meet up with him and the two of us went to Tivoli, the amusement park in the center of Copenhagen. This time of year it is all decorated for Halloween which was cool. We didn't go on any of the rides because they were expensive and I didn't want to spend too much money, but just walking around the area was fun.

The next day I went back into the center of the city and just wandered around again and saw all of the normal tourist sights that I had missed the day before. Here is a selection of pictures from my wandering both days:

Christiansborg Palace

View from the tower at Christiansborg Palace

Rosenborg Castle

Nyhavn

The Round Tower

Me at the Round Tower

A square we walked through that I really liked

Entrance to Tivoli

Christiania, an autonomous community within Copenhagen.

The Little Mermaid

Overall I really enjoyed Copenhagen, even though I was only there for 2 days. I love the style of the buildings and how colorful they are. It's probably good I wasn't there for too long though because it's pretty expensive. The currency conversion is confusing because $1 is about 6 kroner, which is not an easy calculation to do when I see the price of something, and just in general things cost more in all of the Scandinavian countries. It was very comforting when I returned to the Euro Zone because even though the exchange rate with the Euro is not in my favor, at least it is similar enough that I know about how much something costs me just by looking at the price.

Next stop was Amsterdam, where I met back up with my wonderful sister! We couchsurfed there as well with two different hosts. The first host was an older man who lived right across the canal from the central train station, which was very convenient to get places. We had our own room in his apartment and he made us tea the first night we arrived and gave us tips about places to go in Amsterdam. We stayed with him for the first 4 nights we were in Amsterdam, and for the most part he just let us do our own thing and come and go as we pleased.

The first morning we were sightseeing we just decided to wander and see what we found in the city. Amsterdam was also surprisingly walkable, and other than taking a free ferry to get to and from our host's apartment, we didn't have to take public transportation at all most of the days. So we did some wandering, saw the enormous line at the Anne Frank house and decided definitely not to get in it, got a good idea of where the major museums were and how much they cost, and eventually decided to go into the Heineken Experience, which is what the Heineken Brewery calls their tour. I actually didn't realize Heineken was from Amsterdam before I got there (turns out I really don't know much about many of the cities I'm visiting so I've just been finding things out as I go), but I'm always up for a brewery tour so we decided to go. It was really fun, although a little pricey. We got a general overview of how Heineken was created and how it is made, went on a virtual tour where they put you through the brewing process, got to see the Heineken horses, had a tasting, and then the tour ended with 2 free beers for each person.

The next day we decided to get to the Van Gogh museum first thing in the morning to avoid the long line, and we were able to get in without waiting too long. After that we went to the Houseboat museum, which was an actual houseboat that used to be occupied but then was turned into a museum, and then the Museum of Prostitution. It was interesting to learn some things about the prostitution business since we had walked through the Red Light District a few times. Since prostitution is illegal in so many places, it's not something most people are around most of the time, but in Amsterdam it's very obvious because you walk right past prostitutes in the windows. Even though it's a little bit of a strange concept for someone who comes from a place where it's not legal (it was legal in Clark County, Nevada, where Las Vegas is but not actually in the city of Vegas, and it was not as obvious there), I think it's a good thing that it's legal in Amsterdam. When you take something like prostitution or marijuana (which is also prevalent in Amsterdam as I'm sure most people know) and you bring it out into the open, it makes it safer for those who are involved in it. Making something illegal won't stop everyone from doing it, it just means they have to hide it, which means people aren't likely to say anything if they get into a bad situation. In Amsterdam the prostitutes are able to call the police if someone is harassing them or making them feel unsafe. We saw a situation like that when we were walking around. I don't know exactly what happened, but we saw police around one of the doors where a prostitute was working and they were talking to a man who I assume had been causing some kind of trouble. In a situation where prostitution was illegal, the prostitute would have had no option of calling for help from the police. Similar situation with marijuana. Interestingly, I learned that marijuana is not actually legal in the Netherlands, it is just decriminalized in small amounts,so you can only buy up to 5 grams a day and if you have plants you can only have a few for personal use. The country decided that instead of making arrests for marijuana they wanted to focus more on hard drugs, and instead of just arresting and imprisioning drug users, they give them access to programs that will help them overcome their addiction. It has been amazingly successful and their rates of hard drug use have dropped significantly, and the crime rates that are typically associated with things like drugs and prostitution are much lower than in other places.

The third day we got to the Anne Frank house early, before it opened, in order to beat the major crowds we had seen the first day. We only ended up waiting about 20 minutes after it opened, which was only an hour altogether, which was way better than I was anticipating. It was quite a sad experience given the tragic story of the Frank family, but it was something I was glad I was able to experience. It's good that there are story's like Anne's that people will always remember so that the world doesn't forget the terrible things that happened during World War II. I've never read the Diary of Anne Frank but now I really want to.

Our last full day we didn't have anything else specific we wanted to do so we decided to take a free walking tour of the city. It was a little backwards since we had already seen many of the things on the tour, but it was cool to get more history and information about the city, and the tour guide pointed out small details that I never would have noticed, like the narrowest house in Amsterdam.

That evening we moved to our second host's apartment. We had been in contact with him first out of the two hosts but he could only host us for one night. He seemed like a really cool guy so even though the other host would have let us stay the whole time, we decided to stay with the second guy the last night because we wanted to meet him. He lived a little farther from the center so we had to take the metro, but his place was near where Danielle had to take the bus the next morning so it worked out. He was super nice and we had some great conversations, and he helped us figure out our plans for Paris. We still didn't have a place to stay in Paris (it is so hard to find available couchsurfing hosts in certain cities, which I discovered in Salzburg and unfortunately we discovered with several cities that we should have started looking earlier), so we booked a hostel for the first night just so that we knew where we would be going when we arrived. Then we found a host who could take us for the other nights we are there, so it was great to finally have a plan. We still didn't have much of a plan for what we want to see other than the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, so it will be similar to how we'd been doing other cities, just show up and see what seems interesting.

Here is a selection of Amsterdam photos: