I got to Amsterdam around noon and went straight to the hostel. It's very close to the center of town, but it's north of the Ij which means that I have to take a ferry whenever I want to go to or from the hostel. There's no bridge since it's such a huge shipping route and the metro has to go so deep that the nearest stop is pretty far inland. The ferries run constantly, 24/7, so it's not much of a problem though. The cyclists getting on and off make things difficult sometimes. My time in the Netherlands has caused me to resent cyclists somewhat. They seem to think that they're as nimble as someone on foot, and that any spaces for pedestrians are also acceptable for them to bike through. They're totally wrong, of course, and so I've almost been run over more times than I can count.

Amsterdam is completely different from Rotterdam. It has no skyscrapers, all the buildings are extremely old and short, and the streets are constantly packed wherever I go. It's much prettier and more walkable in general. Apparently, the reason Rotterdam feels so modern is because the city was completely flattened when the Nazis invaded and they had the opportunity to rebuild with more modern principles in place. Having been spared the worst of the damage to infrastructure, Amsterdam is remarkably unchanged. I do find it hard to escape the fact that this is a tourism hotspot in a way that I haven't seen in any of the other cities I've visited thus far. It seems that every shop references either drugs or prostitution in their branding, and these two relatively minor facets of life here generally eclipse the fact that this is a city with an incredible amount of history and culture. I think that's really too bad. Another part of that is that it increasingly feels to me as though English is the primary language here. When people talk to you on the street, they open with English. In a way, it makes sense. Virtually every Dutch person speaks English (near perfectly as well, I often can't even tell they aren't native speakers), and almost nobody from outside the Netherlands speaks Dutch, so it's a better bet to not bother trying to speak it. It's certainly convenient for me, but it's still disappointing and I feel as though it further contributes to the strange sense I have that this is a theme park rather than an actual city that people live in.

I didn't do a ton yesterday; I spent a fair bit of the afternoon sorting out my Germany plans for next week (prices in Berlin seem to have fallen dramatically for some reason), and once I had a chance to check in I mostly walked around downtown. The hostel is enormous and couldn't be more different from the one I stayed in the previous night in Rotterdam. It's nice though, just extremely corporate and impersonal feeling. In the evening I reconnected with someone from Brussels a few nights ago and we got a huge group of people together to go out. A disturbing amount of Australians were in the group and I'm starting to think that they've replaced Germans as the most frequent hostel goers. Anyway, we got a really good group together and went out to see the nightlife. We ended up walking through the red light district, which is huge, and it was fairly uncomfortable. They're really not subtle at all about things. Ultimately we went to a club a little closer to the hostel, also north of the Ij, and it was fun although extremely packed. The bouncer was a complete jerk who tried to make getting in as hard as possible, but we got there in the end. At one point, I got asked what sort of drugs I was using to give me so much energy and I had to disappoint when I explained that aside from a single beer four hours prior I was completely sober. She didn't believe me.

I'm looking forward to doing some more substantial things here over the next couple days until I leave for Hamburg Monday night. I think I'll probably stay there a couple days and then to Berlin for the marathon, and ultimately to Copenhagen after that. However, I may try and sneak in a stop at Szczecin so that I don't spend too much time paying Berlin prices. It would also be a rough to go from listening to German straight into having to listen to Danish, one of the only languages I can think of that might actually be uglier.