Amsterdam-you early morning bus!
I have a new found appreciation for the army, notably bootcamp. We ran about 2500km from our Hostel in Amsterdam to the bus station because we were running late to catch an 8:45 bus to the Eindhoven airport. Running through the streets of Amsterdam with about 20kg of stuff in your backpack is not fun. But Lisa, Jen and I made the bus with 4 minutes to spare, nice work girls!
Amsterdam is a beautiful city! Its all canals and brick buildings. Brick and water are two of my favorite things, I wanted to stay there forever. And as a classic example of Dutch practicality... here is the skinniest house in Amsterdam, a whopping 1.6 meters wide. (and that dude was our tour guide for spacial reference)
Did you know that marijuana (because everyone knows you can smoke it in The Netherlands) is not actually legal in the Netherlands. The Dutch are just practical people and decided that going after hard drugs like heroin and cocaine were a better use of their dollars and police force. Therefore noone has actually been arrested for smoking or posession of pot since the mid-70's.
There are also a lot of hippies, black people and Rastafarians (I'm sorry if I spelled that wrong... and I'm sorry to kind of steriotype...but its true) in Amsterdam. You may be thinking, "thanks for pointing out the obvious, laur".. well duh. But the interesting thing here is that they are mostly all tourists. Only 9% or so of Dutch adults smoke pot, compared to 16 or 17% of Americans, mid-teens % of Spanish, British, Italian, Germans, 20-some-odd percent of Aussies, etc. Why is this a point worth bringing up? Well I'll tell you, tourism and tax dollars. Get with the program upstate NY! If you want to boost your tourism dollars, just look the other way about certian "illegalities" and semi-regulate it so you can tax it. People will come.
Amsterdam is a beautiful city! Its all canals and brick buildings. Brick and water are two of my favorite things, I wanted to stay there forever. And as a classic example of Dutch practicality... here is the skinniest house in Amsterdam, a whopping 1.6 meters wide. (and that dude was our tour guide for spacial reference)
Did you know that marijuana (because everyone knows you can smoke it in The Netherlands) is not actually legal in the Netherlands. The Dutch are just practical people and decided that going after hard drugs like heroin and cocaine were a better use of their dollars and police force. Therefore noone has actually been arrested for smoking or posession of pot since the mid-70's.
There are also a lot of hippies, black people and Rastafarians (I'm sorry if I spelled that wrong... and I'm sorry to kind of steriotype...but its true) in Amsterdam. You may be thinking, "thanks for pointing out the obvious, laur".. well duh. But the interesting thing here is that they are mostly all tourists. Only 9% or so of Dutch adults smoke pot, compared to 16 or 17% of Americans, mid-teens % of Spanish, British, Italian, Germans, 20-some-odd percent of Aussies, etc. Why is this a point worth bringing up? Well I'll tell you, tourism and tax dollars. Get with the program upstate NY! If you want to boost your tourism dollars, just look the other way about certian "illegalities" and semi-regulate it so you can tax it. People will come.
posted by laur @ 11:36 AM
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