Goede avond, Amsterdam!

We arrived at the Schipol International Airport around 14.00 yesterday afternoon after a 50 minute flight. After an unceremonious stamp by the passport official welcoming us to Amsterdam, we headed to our hostel: The Flying Pig Uptown. We took a very comfortable train, followed by a tram leaving from Amsterdam Centraal. The tram was an interesting, crowded, bumpy experience but nonetheless was really freaking cool. The city is amazing, full of buildings of quite a different style than those in London. Everything looks older and more quaint, even in the big city areas. Of course, that's speaking only of uptown; we haven't been downtown yet. It'll be interesting to see how similar (or different) the two are.

The hostel is really cool, with dimly colored lights everywhere and a mix of American punk and psytrance music playing in the common areas at all times. Very dark and smoky, with a nice smoking room in the back. Everyone seemed really chill, but maybe that's because they were all stoned. There's even a full bar with my newest favorite beer, Leffe. I'll definitely be drinking that over the next few nights.

Since we got into the city so late, we decided to just wander around and explore for the next hours. It was a bit cold and rainy, but we got used to it pretty quickly. The complete awesomeness of the city distracted us from our weather-induced discomfort pretty well. Many of the cheaper food places seem to close by 7 or 8, but we found this tiny hole-in-the-wall pizza place and went inside. There were two men gambling at the only table in the room, and their family on the side watching "How I Met Your Mother" with Dutch subtitles. Eventually one of the men got up and made us pizza in just a few minutes. The three of us entertained ourselves by looking at all the pictures on the wall and trying to guess what the Dutch captions meant. It's amazing how close a lot of Dutch is to English. Gotta love sharing those Germanic roots.

We ate the pizza back at the hostel and drank a pitcher of beer, and then we headed out to the Damp Kring coffee shop a few canals up from us. The atmosphere was ridiculously un-coffeeshop-like, but the fact that they had about 30 canisters of weed just sitting on the counters along with a full menu with prices, flavors, effects, and strains was fantastic beyond words. I ordered some Hypnotic Kush for 11 Euro and attempted to roll a joint, quite poorly. But it didn't quite matter; even though it was definitely one of my worse frankenjoints it certainly got the job done!