I Am Amsterdam

Mark and I arrived in Amsterdam around 7pm and the streets are decorated in bright orange. The Netherlands has a match against Italy in the Euro 2008 tonight; national pride is high. Pubs are crowded full of patrons wearing orange and shouting at the big screen playing the game. Even sex shops have their tvs in the front of the store televising the match.



Amsterdam is a bike friendly town. In fact the preferred way of travel is by bike and bikes are literally everywhere. One of the first structures we see while exiting the train station is three level parking garage full of bikes. Along all the bridges, sidewalks and railing are piles of bikes. There are so many bikes that people don't even lock their bikes up to the railing. Instead they just lock the wheels to the frame. As I walk around the street, bicycle bells echo throughout the crowds.



Our hostel is located a street over from the red lights on the edge of the actual district. The first night, we decided to walk around to try to find a place to eat. It is pretty weird seeing restaurants between "The Dildo World", "The Magic Mushroom Shop". We grabbed a cheap kebab place which made me miss the good kebabs of London all that much more. All the food in the area is overpriced and lacking in quality, but that's ok because people don't come here for food.



Amsterdam is full of canals and they quickly help us navigate and become landmarks when we get lost. The streets of Amsterdam are narrow and walking through them you undoubtedly run into some shady people shooting off their inventory at you: "charlie, coke, extacy". Red lights windows litter this area. Ladies of the night wearing nothing more than their underwear pose infront of these windows. They look bored most of the time and I started to notice some of them were texting on their phones. The funny thing is that it seems like only guys are out the first night.

There is an unwritten law that pictures should not be taken in the red light district. There is one bridge where people can get touristy pictures taken, but everywhere is strictly off limits. The ladies of the night all have eagle eyes for tourists taking pictures of them. While walking through one of the alleys, we ran into a situation where a wife sneakily took a picture of the red light windows. Immediately four prostitutes ran out of their windows and one of them grabbed the woman by the hair. They all shout profanities in perfect English at the woman and it takes her husband to push them all back.

Dell Fixed!

Our train ride to Amsterdam was long and had several stops. As our ride came close to the city I saw lots of skyscrapers with interesting architecture. And to my surprise I also a large building with the DELL logo on the top. I immediately saw this as an opportunity to get my laptop fixed. I had run into problems in Paris since even though I could get an XPS service tech to come out and swap my motherboard and video card, the language barrier and lack of time made it nearly impossible. I couldn't even get through the French menu's, I had to call the US to make sure that a foreign replacement policy on my laptop was even possible.

Google Maps was able to tell me that there was indeed a Dell office building in Amsterdam. During one of my free days in Amsterdam I took the metro over with my laptop in my backpack. I bought 2 tickets on the metro and used the first one to get to the stop. I noticed that no one really checked tickets and there was no validation for the ticket I used. Basically I just swiped the ticket when I walk into the station and it lights up green. All the gates are open so I was sure there was plenty of people that would just walk through without paying.

I was able to catch some people outside the building on smoking breaks and luckily most Dutch people speak perfect English. I found out that the center was the headquarters for Belgium and the Netherlands. The person that was able to help me was an sales and he was able to schedule a next day repair service for my laptop. So I left it overnight. On my way back I saw a station that was full of uniform officers and giving most people tickets.

I picked it up the laptop the very next day. My 1 year warranty covered all the repair costs and it turned out that it was a overheated video card which required a motherboard replacement since the card is soldered onto the motherboard. Now everything is back to normal. It'll take me a while to get everything back to up to date since I was without it for a while.

Muscles from Brussels

Mark has joined me for 2 months for his Eurotrip. We decided to do a day trip through Brussels, Belgium on our way to Amsterdam, Netherlands. The train ride from Paris to Brussels required reservations and set us back 14€ each. The train from Brussels to Amsterdam is free with our rail pass. I was kind of skeptical about the value of the rail pass, but I bit the bullet and told Mark to buy me one two. We both have a eurail pass for 10 days of travel in 2 months.

We locked up our main packs at the station and took our daypacks into Brussels to explore the city. When I think of Brussels I think of Beligum Waffles. When Mark hears Brussels he thinks of Jean-Claude Van Damme, aka Muscles from Brussels. With that in mind the first things we do upon arrival in the morning is to try find some Beligum Waffles and a Van Damme tshirt. Sadly we were only able to accomplish one of those two goals.



The rest of the day we explored the touristy areas of the city and wandered around aimlessly. We had both dropped the ball and not researched anything about the city that we were visiting. Nonetheless we were able to find all the areas of interested fairly easily.







The tube system in Brussels is pretty confusing. Multiple trains run on the same track and they all veer off in different directions. The direction, stop, and line numbers are not that clear either. There is even a section where you have to get off the tube and walk across the track. Seems pretty dangerous especially since its not really monitored, people just have to look both ways and make sure a train isn't coming before crossing. That evening we took the tube back to the train station to Amsterdam.

Paris Food

I had several authentic French dining experiences in Paris and I have to say that they were all good. Most restaurants have a 3-4 course meals and the prices aren't too bad. The first area was by the Châtelet area where waiters stand on the outside of their restaurants in an attempt to get people to come in.

We selected a French restaurant and I was finally able to try some escargot (snails) and frog legs as appetizers, salmon as the main course, and dessert of course. The escargot came with a special snail holding thongs and a spear looking utensil to hook the meat out. It was kind of difficult to eat at first but once you get the first one the rest are easy. I've had frog legs before as a child in China, but I felt obligated to try them while in France.









Another cafe next to opera I was able to try some rabbit in mustard sauce. I had never had it and I saw rabbit in the supermarket in Nice. Ever since then I had been interested. This meat was probably the most tender meat I've had. It melted apart.

My Laptop Died

Hello friends. Sad news but my Dell XPS m1330 has died after in its first 7months of use. I am guessing that the graphics card has overheated since I get vertical lines during boot and during initial post, before bios even pops up. I still have a 1 year warranty so hopefully I can get this resolved in Europe. The problem is I dont have a permanent location and won't be speaking the native language. Wish me luck, but otherwise this site maybe be dead for a while too.

This is Wei signing off for now =(

Notre Dame: Revisited

Notre Dame is a place I've already seen and from my initial glance of it I was a little bit disappointed. This time around I went to check out the towers of Notre Dame with Mark, Tim, Jasen and Chad. This time I also had my 70-300mm zoom lens and was able to see some of the details of this structure.



All of the gargoyles are different and unique. The same can be said to all the statues that are craved into this building. I was truly impressed by the detail of this place. Although I am still shocked at how small the building is compared to what I had imagined in my mind from Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame movie.





We took the tower tour which had over 400 steps going up one of the towers. From the top there is a pretty good view of the Eiffel Tower and Sacré-Cœur. The ledges were very tight with all the tourists and there are even passages that were difficult to squeeze through with a backpack. At the very top there is a bell tower where I guess where legend says the hunchback once lived.







After the view we descended and took a free tour of the insides of the church. It was pretty interesting that there are all these signs outside saying no flash photography, yet people were snapping pictures left and right with their flash on. The inside is massive and huge compared what I had expected from the view of the exterior. It is much more of a tourist area than a church now.





Here are some panoramic shots from the top of the two towers.

Versailles Daytrip

Besides the famous Treaty of Versailles, I really don't know much about it. Versailles is a 30-40minute RER ride from Paris. It costs about 2€, but in our case if you forget to buy a ticket prior to getting on the train, hope that a nice cute girl is running the gates on the other end and lets you and your group of 5 friends pass for free. Mark has just arrived to France and will be traveling with me for about 2 months. He was nice enough to bring me Canon 70-300mm zoom lens. So hopefully I will be able to have some good close up pictures from here on out. I was also able to meet up with the Canadians from Nice, minus Sacha who wussed out and went back to Canada.







There is a fee to get into the palace of Versailles, but the gardens are free. I was told ahead of time that the palace was not worth it. We did just that and went straight to the gardens. It was massive and the land was wide open. There was so much space and the gardens were beautifully designed. The only down side was that the fountains were not on when we went.









There is a long stretch of water towards end of the garden. This lake has row boats for rental and we were able to rent two boats with 3 people in each. The row boats were fun, but it showed just how bad our form was as we were zig zagging across the water. Its much more about technique than strength. We played bumper boats and even ran into a hissing swan. He was not happy with us and hissed at us repeatedly.