July 17, 2008: Amsterdam
After Rotterdam, we took a train ride to Amsterdam to meet Dre at the hostel we reserved. Based on price and user comments on the Hostel World website, we settled on what proved to be a great, clean, inexpensive hostel with nice amenities called Shelter City, located in the heart of the Red Light District. The catch? Oddly enough, the hostel is an Evangelical Christian one that offers daily church prayer and bible studies sessions, as well as pamphlets on the gospels and huge signs reading “Jesus is Lord” and the likes.
A mildly offensive picture taken of me at the Hostel...influenced by the Exorcist (read on)
Although I have been raised in a Jewish household (information that I did not divulge upon my arrival!), I was more bewildered and awestruck that such a hostel could exist in the heart of Sin City than uncomfortable in this habitat where we lived for five days. We had an ongoing joke that after people came home to the hostel from their drug, sex, and alcohol binges, the receptionists would throw holy water on them and act out a similar ritual as is performed at the end of the movie The Exorcist, where the two priests, in an attempt to save the young girl’s soul, pray for her, repeatedly yelling “the power of Christ compels you!” to try to exorcise her demons. Pretty culturally insensitive I realize, but try to forgive my sins! Check it out:
I did actually hear of a situation when a guy came back drunk and was sat down by one of the staff members to talk about how what he did was wrong and that he should reform (in so many words). Nonetheless, the staff members were very friendly and were even willing to play a card game that suits us well called “asshole.”
Otherwise in Amsterdam, we biked all around the city (in true Dutch fashion) including through the beautiful Vondelpark where we also climbed trees, ate amazing Dutch Pancakes (left), 
saw a cool free break dancing performance (right),
went to Europe’s largest Public library, as well as to the Vincent Van Gogh museum. We also went to the Sex Museum, which was a total waste of the three euro entrance fee, as I guess we were expecting a nuanced and entertaining museum on human sexuality, and basically got a bunch of big stone phalluses instead. This was disappointing as essentially everywhere you turn in Europe you can see big stone phallic monuments that are all free to view.
Great view from top floor of Amsterdam Public Library, overlooking the entire cityscape.
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