Sex, Cries, and Videotape

If my brain were a train, it would be on a return voyage right now. This blawg's stop: Amsterdam. In fact, after my Block I exams, my brain immediately started to see the endgame here. One month from today, I will be done with classes at Erasmus (except for two take-home exams and a paper in late January...) and preparing to head home. I plan to ultimately do a final write-up summarizing my overall experience on exchange, but one bit of learned-ness I take away from this experience is that homesickness is inevitable. It does not have to take the form of a full-blown desire to leave but rather gnaws ever so slightly at your feet. Moreover, expectations can change - quickly. The moment I left my final Block I exam, I felt not only a sense of relief, but also a desire to do things differently for the rest of my time in Rotterdam. I dropped out of a more time-intensive class for one that is not related to international law but frees me time-wise to do other things. Although school is the principal reason I'm here, I want to take full advantage of my remaining month to experience more: more travel, more events and activities, more socializing. Simply put: more fun. (Easier to say without exams looming on the horizon...)

So, Amsterdam. I took a day trip to Amsterdam right before finals to get some fun in before the exam period (which here takes place in one week with no official study period). My trip started in an interesting manner. I've mentioned it on Facebook, but just to flesh it out a bit... I took a morning train out of Rotterdam Central Station and had the "pleasure" of "meeting" two guys who were still high on ecstasy from the night before. I was trying to figure out the train schedule when they came up from behind me and loudly yelled "Hey you!" I thought they were going to ask me for money, but they just asked me how I was doing. We started talking about the States, because one of the guys told me he's going to Las Vegas to party sometime soon. At some point during the "conversation," one of the guys asked if he could touch my hair. He began by lightly patting me on the head but then rapidly devolved into an awkward shampoo commercial-style rubdown: 

  --->

Meanwhile, the other guy wondered aloud whether, since I'm from the United States, I might be half black. Maybe mixed-race people in the Netherlands are like unicorns, or as numerous as Dutchmen who think Zwarte Piet insensitively reduces skin color to a costume. Anyways, after a good minute of having my hair manually exfoliated, I told them I had to catch my train. This prompted a two-minute long handshake where the two fellows couldn't recall if they had further questions for me. 

Once I finally got on the train, I soon realized the trip would not take 28 minutes, as my Amsterdam-Rotterdam ride at the start of my exchange did. Apparently the high-speed rail to Amsterdam only goes to Schipol Airport and not Amsterdam Central Station, so the total travel time ended up being 70 minutes. One thing I also did not consider is that trains can get very, very crowded on a relatively-busy route. By the time the train arrived in Amsterdam, the place was standing-room only. I had someone's Dutch butt in front of my face for a significant portion of the trip. 

I decided first to get a 24hr "travel pass" since I was running a bit beyond my anticipated schedule. It seems like most major European cities have "travel" and "city" passes that give you unlimited public transportation and/or discounted to free attractions. However, most of the attractions attached to the (40 euro) Amsterdam city pass are museums, and learning is boring...plus I didn't anticipate spending 40 euros on museum admission in ~8 hours. 

Ironically, I began my Amsterdam adventure at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam's modern art museum. To add a further delay to my plans (which didn't really exist because I didn't go to Amsterdam with a plan, so I'm essentially complaining about nothing), the line to get into Stedelijk was massive. In fact, it was almost as long as an average pair of Dutch legs. So, about a city block. For reference, it took at least 30 minutes to make it to the ticket counter. The museum itself was fairly representative of modern art as I see it: a mixed bag of amazingly colorful and surreal/abstract pieces and ... trash cans next to lava lamps.  

 vs.

Maybe the trash can exhibit was meant to symbolize how we see some forms of art as garbage. The lava lamps then represent how our opinions are artificially molded, but can be deconstructed with a little energy. Or perhaps, some homeless guy found this stuff in a dumpster behind a vintage shop. Whether you're on Team Art or Team Trash, what's important is that these trash cans and lava lamps are open to interpretation...right? There was even an exhibit on the design variants of household goods. Translation: look at some plates and furniture - it's art! However, whoever designed this "dat ass meme" boombox wins:

After Stedelijk, I headed back towards the train station to find a place called Electric Ladyland. Apparently, the owner of a fluorescent-art gallery built a fluorescent-art museum in the basement of the gallery. Full disclosure: I have a major obsession with psychedelic color patterns and neon hues. I had basically made my decision to travel to Amsterdam premised on seeing this place. Of course, I had miscalculated yet again: the museum is not open on Sundays. I was left to simply look through the window at what might have been, the one that got away, as I saw every sad clown picture flashing before my eyes, felt the panoply of emotions experienced by watching the ending of Marley and Me on repeat, and imagined the collective pain and suffering of humanity. 

Like any good lawyer-to-be, I decided to drown my sorrows in alcohol. Genever/Gin, to be exact. I made my way from the north end of town back to the south end, which houses most of the city's museums as well as the "I amsterdam" statue:

Even though the temperature was hovering around 50F/10C outside, I kept my promise to myself to eat waffles and ice cream for lunch:

After "lunch," I went to the nearby House of Bols, which is a genever museum/shameless advertisement for Bols brand genever. I learned all about the history of Bols, the process of making genever, yada yada yada two main points. 1) Two gin tastings and a custom cocktail are included in the admission price. 2) The largest part of the exhibit is a "smell tasting" room, where you sniff various scents to discern the sensitivity of your nose to subtle flavors:

As expected, I would fail miserably as a gin-maker, because I have almost no sense of smell. If I were blindfolded, and someone shoved an orange slice up my nose, I would probably guess I was smelling stale old people. If someone asked me to describe the smell in a room full of roses, I would probably say I smell a lot of nothingness. If someone locked me in a room filled with gasoline and told me my life depended on identifying the smell, I would probably say "Why are you doing this to me?"

I wasn't sure what to do with myself afterwards. I could blame it on the a-a-aa-a-al-cohol. Or I could blame it on my la-a-a-ack of upfront planning. Either way, after doing the stereotypical lawyer activity of drinking, I recalled that men stereotypically think about sex every six seconds. Putting two and two together, makes four, but also reminded me that I heard about a sex museum in Amsterdam. Turns out there are two of them. Since one of them is in the Red Light District, I reduced the overall sketchiness of a guy going to a sex museum on his own by opting for the other choice. Needless to say, I can't exactly post too many pictures from my visit there. However, it is a very interesting museum. If you thought late 19th-century porn was all lady ankles, THINK AGAIN. The museum houses all sorts of antiquated pornography, as well as old-timey sex toys, sex marketing and other sex-related stuff. One thing that was particularly strange was this weird bird bath/odd bronze statue composed of penis sculptures arranged in a circle (fair warning, the picture below, which you have undoubtedly already seen with your peripheral vision, shows anatomically-detailed phalli):

Now that I have shocked my audience, time to detail the last bit of my trip. There's only one place to go after a visit to the sex museum: the Red Light District. There's really not much to say about it. If you expected the Red Light District to be full of windows surrounded in red neon lights where you can legally "window shop" for prostitutes, you were correct. You can't take pictures or record video in the Red Light District because, hear this crazy story, prostitutes are unionized and actually have certain protections from exploitation. Gasp! I spent my last few hours wandering the city streets near the Red Light District and the train station, and checking out the National Monument nearby. I tried a beer from the local brewery, Brouwerij de Prael, and grabbed pizza and frites for dinner. Very healthy end to a very healthy day.  There was also a small fair randomly outside of De Bijenkorf (the Harrod's of Amsterdam), which was a nice send-off:

That's all for my Amsterdam trip. Hopefully, I will get to my Berlin write-up within the next week.  

Today's Dutch lesson: ruiken (to smell). As in, I am completely unable to ruiken anything.