Netherlands

I headed to Amsterdam, one of my favorite cities of my first European adventure five years earlier. Obviously Amsterdam is mostly known for hookers and weed, but I was a good boy and stuck to generally more wholesome activities. The first night though, me and another dude did the man equivalent of window shopping. When girls window shop, they walk around a mall, stopping anytime they see something they like through the window, but they don't actually buy anything. Well we did the same thing, only instead of a mall, there was a series of tiny dark alleys, and instead of clothes in the windows, there were hookers in the window. Same thing. 

The next day I went on a bike tour of Amsterdam. Amsterdam is probably overrated as a debaucherous city, but underrated as a scenic city. There's a ring of canals around the centre of the city:

There's the ubiquitous windmills:

That one is the oldest, or is significant for some other reason I can't remember. I think it's still fully operational as well.

There's also some nice open areas, like parks and general chill areas:

Which reminds me. Amsterdam was the location for my first run in nearly six months. It did not go well. There's also a billion cyclists in this city, and they're well protected. Any accident between a bike and a car here is assumed to be the fault of the driver of the car. I wouldn't blame any car driver for running over this idiot though.

He's riding his bike sideways, which has zero advantages over the conventional way of riding a bike, and many obvious disadvantages. With inventions as stupid as this, I can only imagine that my transparent toaster invention will go gangbusters if I ever choose to market it.

After some time in Amsterdam, I decided to try something different. I went to Google maps and picked a city at random, and went there. My only criteria was that the city have a hostel. The lucky city was Utrecht. I picked well, very well. Utrecht is a like a smaller version of Amsterdam, complete with canals, a red-light district and big tower.

The hostel was an interesting experience as well. Here I firstly met two Scots, Liam and Jimmy. Liam and I had a great time listening to Jimmy's stories. Jimmy could have been anywhere from 40 to 70 for all I know. He had done a LOT of drugs in his time. He was an expert in smuggling drugs and had been to prison three times, in three separate countries. Now you may wonder why I would want to talk to people like this. Well the reason is, I get a different perspective on life and learn a lot of new things. For example, Jimmy gave me a detailed comparison of prisons in England, Scotland and Spain. Turns out English prisons are the best, Scottish prisons are OK and Spanish prisons are really bad. So now if I feel like committing a crime in Europe, I know that England would be the logically place to do it. But I should mention that for a guy that spent 99% of his waking hours smoking weed, he was surprisingly sound of mind.

But truly the highlight of my time here was attending 'Summer of Darkness'. This was an internationally renowned goth festival that just happened to be on at the time I was there. I headed there with Finish Hanna and a Dutch guy, whose name I've forgotten. There were these guys (the guy in orange was the aforementioned Dutch guy):

And these guys:

And then I saw her. I don't know if it was her pitch black eyes or her gas mask, but my heart skipped a beat and I knew I had found the girl of my dreams:

Actually she's kinda hot. Can't wait for her to meet mum and dad.

Unfortunately I lacked the courage to speak to this beauty, but I stuck around for a burlesque show.

Now I wanted to go to Belgium, but because the Tommorowland festival was on, everywhere was booked out for a few days, so I decided to go visit another Dutch city - Rotterdam.

Rotterdam was also good to visit. It's a more modern looking city, probably thanks to the Germans bombing the hell out of it in WWII. It has some interesting and unique architecture. Let's have a look. First, a bridge:

I guess that's pretty boring, but I do this intentionally to lower your expectations. And now I blow your mind with a picture of this freaking cool apartment complex:

I'ts a bunch of angled, cube shaped apartment buildings. Totally impractical, but who cares, it looks cool. Here's a pic of one up closer:

I guess the biggest problem of living in these buildings is you have annoying tourists taking pictures of your house all day. I was honored to fill this role for one day.

Here's a building that looks more like a game of Jenga:

Summary

Awesome:

The scenery of Amsterdam and Utrecht (both the land and the people)

The interesting architecture of Rotterdam

Prison stories

Goth festival

Craptacular:

Amsterdam is expensive as hell

What's Next

Belgium. Creators of the best beers in the world and French fries