Amsterdam and Munchen

I returned home yesterday from my short trip to Amsterdam and München. Despite having to walk back from the train station at 11:30 at night, the trip was a success.

First things first. Amsterdam is just ridiculous. The city is absolutely gorgeous. Most cities are referred to by guide books as “concentric circles.”? Most of the time this is a lie. Concentric implies some sort of regularity. When the guidebook described Amsterdam as circular, I had my doubts. Let me be the first to say that I was wrong. Amsterdam is virtually a perfect circle around the train station. Radiating out from center are a number of roads and a few canals, and everything is circled by both roads and canals. The city is quite impressive. I made sure to attend the Van Gogh museum, and we walked by the Anne Frank house, but I had a backpack on so we couldn’t go inside. We hit one of the coffee shops where I had a coffee, and then we walked around the Red Light district. It was fascinating that people window shop for hookers. I must admit, the whole thing was a bit surreal.

From Amsterdam we trained back to München. The weather was absolutely horrendous, but we made the best of it. We visited a delicatessen known as Dallmayr’s, and it was the most unbelievable “grocery” store We’ve ever seen. The food was all incredibly fresh, and absolutely everything we tried was amazing. Because the weather was so terrible, we decided to spend the rest of the day indoors. We visited both the Hofbräuhaus and the Augustiner brewery. Around mid-afternoon, we headed back to the train station, and caught the train to Wien and from there we got the train to Budapest.

This is the second time that we’ve been late coming into Budapest. The train gets in at like 10:53, and the metro closes very shortly thereafter. Unfortunately for us, we were late by about forty minutes, and were forced to either cab home or walk. We opted for the latter of the two, as the former has a tendency to result in rip-offs. We got home safely though, and hopefully our trip to Wien this week will go off without a hitch.