Amsterdam - just getting started!

I started my two months in Europe in Amsterdam. It was more a matter of good timing than anything. I had been making very loose plans, in the sense of contacting friends who either lived or were planning to travel in Europe when I was there, and finding out when and where might be a convenient time to see them. But I hadn't yet decided where to start, or how to get from England to mainland Europe. Or even exactly when to start.

Then I got an email from my friend C., a German who lives in Australia. She would be in Germany for a few weeks in July - would I like to meet her and a few others in Amsterdam? I checked the dates, and it gave me a week after my exams finished to run around like a headless chook catching up with friends that I'd neglected during exams, going to the final Faculty bash, packing up my room and preparing for my trip.

In fact, it was the day right after the final Faculty bash - but why not start the travelling as you mean to continue, right? (Let's not go into the effects on one's immune system of exams + lack of sleep + even moderate amounts of alcohol + moving almost constantly... A few days won't hurt, right? Got that?)

So I met up with C., A., G. and B. in Amsterdam. Because all of us had cameras, I spent a lot of time forgetting to take mine out with us, and playing with the others' cameras instead. Got some great shots on those... unfortunately, they are being held to ransom, and anyway, they are mainly of my travelling companions (although we also got some pretty cool shots of the absolutely awesome nightclub we found late on Saturday night), and for the purposes of this blog I'm trying to post more pictures of things than of people.

However, I really like this shot, from our first night in town, sitting in a bar, playing pool.



That was Friday night, and I've got to say that it was a fairly typical weekend. I had fun because I was with my friends, people I hadn't seen for quite some time. Yes, there are obvious differences between hanging out with friends in Amsterdam and hanging out with friends in some other city, but to be honest, they're not all that important to me. And of course, I got to see things in Amsterdam that I would not otherwise have seen, and meet people I would not otherwise have met. But my reason - and my friends' reason - for being there was to party together. Amsterdam just happened to be a convenient meeting place for us, for a number of reasons.

And here's the admission: I got the feeling that this was the case for a lot of people there. It made the place seem a little soulless to me, and that made me sad. Because it is a very beautiful, quite unique city. And this sounds trite, but I really liked the canals - I was quite fascinated by them. And by the buildings that were right on the edges of them, like this:



So, anyway, I probably didn't do the city justice. But hey - I had fun, and I got to hang out with my friends. And that's why I went.