Day 3

Okay I would first like to apologise for the essay/thesis I'm going to write. This is due to the fact that I stupidly left my SD card in the laptop and brought a kosong camera out. T_T Anyway thankfully the places I went to will be so oftenly frequented in the next few months that I will certainly take more pictures.

Day 3 started with a museum tour in Amsterdam. Called the Amsterdam Historical Museum, it details the beginnings of the Netherlands and how Amsterdam was once the greatest city in the olden days and how it has developed over time. Museums are one's best bet on how to know the city better.

After the museum tour, we had brunch at this pretty popular pancake restaurant, which is like just steps away from the world reknown Heineken beer brewery! The brewery is like really HUMONGOUS! I'll try to take a picture of it soon! Back to the pancake restaurant, well it serves nice and thin pancakes which is like a hybrid of roti-prata and the regular chinese pancake we have here. There are lotsa toppings as well, like cheese, mushroom, bacon or icing sugar. Again, there is like such a vast difference in tastes, its really interesting to see like different people having different tastes, different ways of eating something that seems so generic. INTERESTING!

Oh ya a complaint I'll like to share (oh man this is so singaporean.. complain complain!) is that they are wayyyyyyy toooooo slowwwwww. We waited like 45 minutes for a pancake and if they operated in Singapore, they'll probably end up selling too little pancakes, earn so little they can't pay for rent and close. And the coke they serve, for 2 Euros, or S$4 is like coke in a 150ml bottle. Yes 2 Euros for 150ml of coke. Someone stab me please.

The city tour which followed after lunch was another cool part of this orientation. We had this American who really looked and acted like the comedian Adam Sandlers. He gave us a good overview of how Amsterdam is like, brought us to the red light district and one of the most famous coffee shops in Amsterdam called Dampkring. This Dampking was the same coffee shop featured in Oceans Twelve with those mega star like George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon.

Check out the video to see how its like inside! Haha



Also, the red light district is probably the world's most open and liberated prostitution area, where prostitution is just like any other jobs and these females actually pay taxes like every other working citizen. People who are amazed by a walk down the lorongs of Geylang will be swept off their feet when they come over here to red light district.

The city tour ended with the tour guide sharing with us a story of how miracles in Amsterdam happened, and almost every old building has its story/legend behind it. He told us about this building where it was a place where a dying man was living, and according to old tradition had to eat a piece of bread as his final meal. He ate the bread and vomitted it out, the bread was 'restored' back as its original state when the servants tried to clear the vomitted stuff by throwing it into the fire, and how this same piece of bread survived numerous fires, as though it was fire-proof. But it suffered a horrible end when a thief stole the silver box containing it when people started worshipping this piece of bread and it was thrown into the Amstel river. Hahaha fire-proof but not-water proof bread! Oh another funny thing about Amsterdammers is that they always boo or call tour guides names, the tour guide would call such people hacklers. It was hilarous to see cyclists ringing their bells when they rode past the tour guide, as a disapproving sign, and others shouting well-intented 'He's lying!', and we will just cheer and everyone starts laughing. Its the kind of thing you'll never see in Singapore!

After dinner we had this Karoke night, which was yet another night for everyone to mingle. Unfortunately I didn't really know alot of the english songs and I was already quite sleepy by 11. I left earlier and tried walking home from the club. Amsterdam has got so many canals and streets that take a different turn at every corner that I kept getting lost when I was supposed to go straight instead of turning left/right. Hahaha indeed I can start to see why people like to use the term 'ho-land' to mean getting lost.

Okay day 4 was pretty similiar but there are other things to share as well! But I need to prepare for this dutch lunch that my residence committee has organised and I will update again real soon!