Travels!

I've spent the last two weekends doing some serious European travel, and let me tell you something: European travel is pretty great. Weekend one was spent with friends Laura and Johann in Aclens, Switzerland (and environs), and weekend two was spent in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (and environs) with friend Emily.

My séjour in Switzerland was pretty low-key. I hung out at Laura and Johann's spiffy new apartment overlooking an Alp or two (on clear days) and some farms and a lovely little village church (everyday). We went for strolls around the local vineyard, cooked lovely meals at home, went into Lausanne for an afternoon (where Laura and I spent about 3 hours in the GROCERY STORE portion of a department store. I blame the Freemans.), had coffee atop another department store (where the picture at left comes from), ate fondue, visited the Crazy Pub, went to a Christmas market at Montreux, got the unofficial tour of the International Labor Organization HQ in Geneva, and spent some time with the Hutzli family and the Villars-Bozon jeunesse. All lovely and relaxing and just so wonderful to spend an easy weekend with such familiar faces. And actually see woods and hills and lakes. All in all: two very enthusiastic thumbs up, Switzerland. Fine holiday fun.Weekend two was spent with my best-friend-here-in-Paris, Emily, in Amsterdam.
Let me tell you a little something about Amsterdam: I really like it. I might even go so far as to say that I "love" it. Legalized drugs and women selling themselves in windows aside, the canals and bikes and museums and social liberalism and stroopwafels all just kind of screamed, "Come live with us!" Don't worry, mom and dad -- I'm not going to drop out of college to live and work illegally in the Netherlands, but don't think the thought didn't cross my mind once or twice over the weekend.
We stayed in the "Flying Pig Uptown Hostel," which was clean and friendly and welcoming and pretty much everything one wants in a first-time hostel experience. Our room had 11 other people in it, ranging from semi-crazy party-girl-type Spanish girls to a veteran backpacker from New York to a nice young American couple (above our bunk), to a fairly low-profile hippie dude with an incredible amount of hair (which was pretty much all we saw of him in his bunk). Most of the tourists in the city at-large seemed to be European (rather than American), which I guess makes sense given that this isn't really a vacation time for anyone in the US, but Amsterdam is a convenient weekend trip for most of Europe. Travel habits of the average European weekender aside, Emily and I spent a lovely weekend balader-ing around the city. Here are some stops we made:
-A trip out to Delft to sleep on Elliot's floor and eat some delicious home-made chicken and peanut sauce
-A walk around the red-light-district
-The Van Gogh Museum and a stroll around Museumsplein, also home to the Rijksmuseum (which is, I think, Dutch history) and the Rembrandt museum. We went into neither, too spoiled from our free entry into everything in Paris.
-The (really amusingly named) HEINEKEN EXPERIENCE, which used to be the Heineken Brewery but is now just a museum celebrating the brewing and advertising history of Heineken.
-A lot of trips to Albert Heijn, the big Dutch supermarket chain, to buy stroopwafels, which are a magical waffle-sandwich-cookie-thing filled with delicious caramel goodness. So good that I believe I, at one point, proclaimed that I would give up all other cookies if I could just eat stroopwafels for my whole life.
Most of what I liked about the city (but couldn't put my finger on) is what I read about in a Slate article last summer about a writer considering a move to Amsterdam: the Dutch concept of gezellig, which apparently translates as something approximating "coziness." I'm not sure what it was, exactly, that gave me this impression (maybe direct comparison with Paris), but everything did seem a little cozier, a little more designed for settling in somewhere comfortable with a drink and a friend and something tasty to eat. Since that is pretty much my idea of a good time, Amsterdam's general vibe suited me pretty well. The point of this whole story is that I'd really like to get back, and I feel like now, if it comes right down to it, I've probably found another place where I could be perfectly happy living once I'm out of college. I'd need to work on my Dutch a little, though. And find a reasonably priced houseboat.