amsterdam

for christmas i had no idea what to get for pam...usually i roll with a bunch of gift cards to fancy places she likes to buy clothes at. boooooooooooooooooooooorrrrriiiiiinnnng.

this year i figured i’d do something more impactful, like a trip. after looking into hawaii and deciding it was way too expensive for a place we might get to and be bored out of our brains just laying in the sun all day long i landed on amsterdam. it’s a place we’ve always talked about checking out so amsterdam it was. amsterdam in the middle of winter was a little odd. hawaii would have been a little more comfortable in february, but what the hell...bars are all the same temperature inside no matter what the temperature outside, right?

man did we ever need some “travelers aid” to begin this trip. let me just say that we had non stop tickets from minneapolis to amsterdam (i paid extra for that luxury), “so why does the

sign say chicago?” you ask? well about an hour or two before we were supposed to leave for the airport i went digging for our passports and noticed pam’s passport was going to expire the

day before we were supposed to come back. yikes! so i spent the next hour or so on the phone with northwest airlines trying to figure out what we should do. they made their phone calls and

i waited (pissed off) and what they came up with is we just needed to change our flight to come home the day the passport expired. great. $400 dollars later we were ready to go. WRONG. we

got to the airport, checked our bags, went to the gate and someone looked at pam’s passport and told us she couldn’t go. what the fuck??? after demanding to speak to the bosses boss we got down to the bottom of the issue...basically you can’t go anywhere out of the country if your passport is set to expire 6 months before the actual “expiration” date. that makes sense. fuckin’ idiots. well, somewhere between pam’s tears and my kindly trying to reason with the dude he decided he was going to help us. he put us on a plane to chicago and told us how she could

get a passport the very next day and set up our flight from chicago to amsterdam with only a one day delay in our original plans.

at the airport in chicago we stopped to ask how to get to the passport agency we needed to be at bright and early in the morning. the woman working there was very helpful and made

phone calls and looked shit up and gave us very detailed directions on where we needed to go. the only problem was she had to be legally blind because her glasses were coke bottle thick

(and than some) and she had to look at things about 2 inches from her face before she could make out what they said. we were very appreciative for her help, but i didn’t put much faith

in the directions we received from her. can you blame me?

while pam waited in line for the passport agency to open up i walked around chicago to check some shit out. this lined started forming outside the berghoff restaurant hours before the

place opened. i figured the food must be killer for that to happen. i picked up a local paper while sitting in a coffee shop and read that the place was closing down at the end of the month.

not sure if this is chicago’s oldest restaurant but it is one of the oldest remaining. apparently the family just felt like they needed to “move on” and the restaurant didn’t fit in their plans.

i’m surprised they didn’t try to sell the place, but there’s always more to the story than you will ever read in the paper. the announcement of the closing bummed a lot of people out and that

line forms everyday until the place closes. man, closing was the best thing that place probably ever did for business. that’s sad. it always sucks to see old cool shit disappear. do you

think people will bum out like that someday when they close down the last TGI friday’s?

a dude walking by the old restaurant probably thinking to himself that he needs to get there before they close down.

that’s really the best part of being in a different city, isn’t it? you get to see all kinds of cool stuff you don’t normally see. like these great old “PARK” signs. hundreds of flashing lights

and neon colors to announce something as mundane as a place to park your car. cool. that’s something you don’t see anymore. in fact, they spent more on those park signs than most new fancy restaurants spend on their signs to get you to come into their place. i guess the bar is set pretty low these days on how cool your sign needs to be no matter what the business is.

i’m not big on taking drugs (legal or otherwise), but on our last trip overseas i discovered ambien. man what a great drug. pop one of those little suckers and BAM, you’re out.

i tend to hallucinate a bit before i actually fall asleep but that’s not such a big deal. anything is better than sitting on a plane for 8 hours staring at that damn video flight map they show you.

you can see how far you’ve gone and how far you have to go and i stare at that sucker the whole time and wish i was dead. not with ambien! i still felt like shit getting off the plane, but not

nearly as bad as i usually do when i go over to europe. i see by the clock that it was about 8:00 a.m. when we were waiting for the train to take us into amsterdam. what a kickass airport

and train system they have over there.

quiet. fast. efficient. why can’t we have public transportation in the U.S. like they do over there?

it’s been said a billion times about amsterdam that there are a lot of bikes in that city, so i don’t need to say it again, but, holyfuck there are a lot of bikes in that city!

usually in europe i’m dodging crazy fast little cars or noisy smelly scooters, but here it was the bikes. never thought i’d get killed by one of those suckers. better than the bikes though

are the miles and miles of narrow alleyways to get lost in. “lost” as in there’s no way to know where you are or where you’re going but it really doesn’t matter because each alley

has 3 or 4 bars in it and with that you never really are “lost” are you?

ironically, the coolest bar we hit (and we hit many cool ones) was the first bar we went to right around the corner from our hotel. we just wandered in, sat down and ordered up a beer.

at this point i didn’t quite understand the beer and how they drink it. all i knew was heineken and amstel light and i was dying for an amstel light. well, this place didn’t have that so rolled

with a heineken. the guy asked me what size i wanted and i sort of looked at him like “what, are you nuts??? give me a pint you pussy!” so he blew the dust off a pint glass and poured

me a heineken. it tasted real good. seemed a little strong but it took me till the second pint to realize how damn strong it was. well, i learned the beer is a little stronger over there and

they drink beer out of glasses we use to drink juice out of. moderation. hmmm. once i stood up i understood. i stumbled my way back to the hotel room and crashed for a few hours.

2 pints of heineken beer worked a lot like those ambien.

lucked out on the hotel for sure. right in the middle of all the action and a walk to the train station. the place was real nice too. when we were checking in the lady at the front desk offered us the upgrade to a suite. why the hell not? see those 2 top windows?...that was our room. very cool. i think we stayed in that room for 5 or 6 days before we switched to the cheaper room. the suite was indeed sweet.

we had a killer view. so much activity 24 hours a day. it was crazy. look at all of those bikes. i swear there’s 3 bikes for every person in that city. or maybe the city placed thousands

of bikes all over like props... ”if we’re going to be known for the city with a lot of bikes, lets really fuckin’ go for it!”

get ready to see a gillion of these.

view of the city from a different hotel window.

i’m not much of a fry guy, but after reading how they were the shit in amsterdam who i am i to say no? i guess the thing that makes the amsterdam fry so good is the double fry the suckers.

first they drop them in oil and cook them for a while. then they pull them out and drop them into another batch of oil and cook them some more. good, and good for you! the third bin there in

the picture is where they throw them to dry off and salt them up. than they scoop them into a paper cone and sell you sauces. the sauce of choice over there is mayo. i hate mayo so there was

no way that was going to happen. seeing people with these cones of big greasy fries and mounds of melting room temperature mayo on top made me want to puke. i just went with good old fashioned ketchup. and i had to pay for it. it’s really strange to pay for ketchup. even mcdonald’s charges for ketchup in amsterdam. i guess we go it it good back home.

the assortment of french fry condiments available should you like to dress yours up. i’m all about ketchup, maybe mustard, but no fuckin’ mayo!

isn’t that how it should be? get some caffeine and get jacked and than get some alcohol and kick it back a notch, all in the same place. we need more of that in the U.S. but it just

doesn’t seem to happen. we put too much stigma on booze. in europe they drink the stuff a lot, but in moderation. what’s wrong with a beer at lunch? nothing if you ask me. i saw security

guards working in the amsterdam airport drinking beers for lunch... and they each had a couple and it was perfectly normal. anyways, this place was sweet, right on the water. it was a

cool little crooked house that looked like it might tip over if you leaned against it. we sat in here a couple times and kicked back.

we kicked back with this dude reading the paper and had a shot of espresso and washed it down with a beer before hitting the streets for more endless walking.