A Week in Amsterdam
I've managed to do pretty much everything I wanted to do in
Amsterdam this week. There was a list of little things, like cycling through the Vondelpark... and cycling as much as possible in general. As I've pointed out before, cycling in this town is a dream. And this time, I have photos. In order, they're an example of a (rather desserted) cycleway (these are about as common as roads exclusively for cars; most roads have separate paths for bikes and usually aren't connected to the road), a traffic light for bicycles (this one is for cyclists making a left turn), my bike in the visitor ("bezoeker") bike parking area of a bank, and a closeup of the child seat installed on the bicycle parked next to mine.
The reason I was at the bank was that I needed to exchange some Dutch gilders that my dad apparently found at home, for some euros. Since the euro has been in for nearly two years now, there's only one bank in Amsterdam that will do this. Euros are pretty, but I like the animals on the guilders. I wish I still had a fl50 note-they had bright yellow sunflowers on them.
I got to see sarahh's work life up close in a couple of ways. Last Friday night I got to go out with her and a lot of her Greenpeace colleagues, and experience their private bar. I didn't exactly clique with the crowd, but I did meet some interesting people. After a while a bunch of us-mostly the IT department, I believe-left that smoke-filled room and had dinner at a falafel place near Leideplein. This turned out to be the highlight of the evening, because I didn't really enjoy the bar we all went to after that. The music they played was top-40 reject rap songs from the early 90s, and I preferred not to be reminded of why I stopped listening to mainstream radio around that time.
On Tuesday, over lunch, SarahH took me to the garden behind Greenpeace's bar. It was a beautiful, peaceful setting, and I was sad when she had to go back to work to deal with global IT crises. The thing I'll never forget is admiring a particular tree, and Sarah telling me that it was the tree that Anne Frank wrote about in her diaries. Anne Frank was a Jewish girl hiding in a house around the block during the second world war, before she was discovered and sent by the Nazis to a death camp. That's the thing about living in Europe: everyday things can remind you that This Shit Really Happened.
The other thing I did today was get the results of the STD tests I did last week. My experience of Amsterdam's sexual health clinic was pretty much the same as last time, except on the day I had the tests done, they found that I had urethritus, a possible sign of chlamydia. Luckily, today's test for that came back negative, as did every other test, so the urethritus was probably just a sign of not drinking enough water at
Burning Man, combined with the suboptimal hygiene that goes with that event. They also gave me free treatment for it last week (which would have also worked if it had been chlamydia), so my health has been restored.
The only thing I missed out on doing this week was seeing a few Amsterdamers who I would have liked to see again. There's no 'phone at Sarah's place so it was hard to give Xaveria Hollander a 'phone call. jordaaner was out of town, as was another LJer that Sarah had hoped to introduce me to. I was too slow to let wreckdoll know that I was in town, and too slow to reply to graphixalice's warm LJ-comment greetings. I'm kind of bummed about this, so I'll make sure I get in touch with these people beforehand next time. It's nice to know that there are so many people in Amsterdam who would like to see me.