Pass that Dutch: Episode One

This is the first installment of our big trip to Amsterdam. So first off, a lot of you are thinking...

1. Why the big trip?
2. And of all the places for a young Mormon couple to venture off to, why Amsterdam?

Well! Since our honeymoon to Mexico turned into gastro-intestinal ish gone crazy, we wanted to do a big trip or a little bit of a redo for our 5 year anniversary...which is in August of this year. And second, I studied a lot of Dutch art in college, and always wanted to go to the Netherlands because they have crazy good art museums there. Also, we made a crazy dear Santa wish list before Christmas where you could ask Santa for anything in the world--so naturally I asked for a Vitamix and Cameron asked for a European vacation to somewhere cool and different, like Amsterdam. Lo and behold! I stumbled upon this insanely good vacation package for really, really, really, cheap. So we pulled the trigger and went for it!

Ok now onto the good stuff! My commentary:

So this whole journey started on a Friday night when we went to Salt Lake to catch a red-eye to New York. Lucky for us we ran into the one and only Casey Jones (Cam's dad) coming in from New York. The best part of this meeting was him saying, "whoa you guys have a red eye?! Here you go, hold out your hand, two ambien!" Cameron just threw both of them into his mouth.

Two ambien.

At once.

I was literally speechless. Couldn't move or yell but just stare until my eyeballs burst. Luckily, Casey's reaction time is MUCH faster than mine and he yelled "spit them out!" Thank goodness he didn't swallow those guys because I would have had to drag his unconscious corpse onto the plane and convince everyone he wasn't dead and/or a drug addict. 

So, for those of you who don't know, ambien makes you sleepy. Like really, really sleepy. You basically only need HALF of one to make you pass out for a long plane ride. So, Cam took half of one, and I wanted to save mine for later (stupid move) and showed everyone on the plane what my dead corpse would look like...with my mouth open. 

We landed in JFK at 5:45 New York time, and taxi'd to our friends the Smith's house on the upper west side. I'm just letting you know, this isn't my official love letter to the Smiths...that comes later. Mr Eliot-stud-man let us sleep in his bed for a few hours and then we hit brunch in NY with Erinn and Andrew. well, lets keep this section brief because I used up a lot of audience attention talking about ambien, but I love NY so much. I assumed when we arrived in Manhattan I would feel really overwhelmed and stressed out but it was more like, "Yes...my people!" After brunch we walked around Central Park and I got really excited to see a crazy person talking to themself. It. was. GREAT! Oh, how i miss that. 

Well! Then we met Cameron's oldest brother Brett for our second brunch to eat the world's best guacamole and hear about Brett's latest conquests. Both did NOT disappoint. 

Then we had to get back to the airport to catch our SECOND red-eye into Dublin. We flew on the National Irish airline...Aer Lingus? Ever heard of it? Me neither, but it is a great airline. Monstrous leg room, good movies, and actually pretty good food. I took my ambien and so I don't remember a ton, except arriving in Dublin, looking around and thinking, "oh yeah, I look like these people."

After a 4 hour layover (hell day) we had another short flight into Amsterdam! We landed, we relieved when freaking everyone spoke English, made it to our hotel and were able to shower for the first time in 2 days. That was glorious.

By now all I wanted to do was sleep, but it was only 2 pm Amsterdam time so we had to stay awake. We bumbled our way to a canal tour like the stupid pig americans that we are and sat down and felt pretty excited. And now we make it to the pictures

Yay we made it! Yay for showers! I feel great!

In front of Central Station, designed by the one and only Cuypers.

Um, so there are a lot of pictures of me, because Cameron took all the photos and hates to take pictures of himself

So, this tour was terrible. Just terrible. It was like sitting in a less fun session of the United Nations because it translated everything into 6 languages...and english was right in the middle, so I'd fall asleep before the english voice could inform me that "this is a tower". Seriously, thats all the tour had to say about it. 

Both trying REALLY hard to stay awake. But sitting down in a warm boat after 2 red-eyes was not the greatest idea. 

Amsterdam from the water

I was getting a little suicidal from that boat ride so we decided to walk around this cute part of Amsterdam called the Jordaan. Its like the Greenwich village of NY (did I spell that right?)

Cool church! Wasn't open.

Yay canals!

Oh cool! more canals.

Surprise! Another picture of me. This is in Dom Square? 

And thats all the pictures of that day. By that time it was only 5:40 and I wanted to go to bed, but Cameron said, ok rest for 10 minutes and then if you stay awake we'll walk around the red light district!

Yeah I know! I know! How dare I! Den of Sin! But it's a tourist attraction, right? I so desperately wanted to. So we did! And here are the deets:

• there really are RED LIGHTS in front of all the brothels.
• All different types of women standing in those windows! All shapes and sizes, and they all looked really sad.
• I basically smoked an entire joint from all the second hand marijuana smoke that was goin on up in there
• We got to the more expensive brothels and it hurt me, deep inside. There was this woman standing in the window, who was so beautiful! Like, almost a wholesome looking face, except she was wearing lingerie and doing the come hither motion with her finger to the men staring at her outside. That just broke me. I was so sad, and kept wondering where her father figure was in her life, why, if she was that pretty, didn't just bag some super rich guy! And I worried about her welfare for like 3 days afterwards. Seriously.
• Also, there's just a ton of porn post up and for sale everywhere. Like postcards of pierced genitals and other weird stuff.

So my advice is, if you go to the red light district for tourist reasons (and not pervert reasons) go during the day, and hopefully it won't break your tender little heart as much. Or don't go, whatevs.

I'm pretty sure we fell asleep at 7:10 and then slept for 15 hours after that!

Stay tuned for episode 2 and more pics......