Despite Team Ramen picking Hong Kong and Singapore for our post-graduation travels, 95% for the dim sum and other asian cuisine, we also figured focusing on post-British-colonial-megaurban-Asia might uncover some interesting cultural mishmashyness.

So here we have it, episode 1, our elevator. Here’s the photo (from right outside our apartment), and let’s deconstruct below!

So the strange thing going on here (and props to Boyce for noticing this first) is that the numbers in Chinese and English DO NOT MATCH. It says “13th floor” in English, but the numerals in Chinese are for the number “14″. Um. Kind of strange that those do not say the same thing, right??

Except then we realized that we are “really” on floor 14, because looking at the buttons inside the elevator, there’s a G floor (where we enter/exit) and the next one up is 1, British-style. Apparently in Chinese it’s the same way we do it in America, where the ground floor is 1 and the next one up is 2?

So the answer to the question of “What floor we live on” would be:

14 – in Chinese
13 – in British
14 – in American, confusingly (for us) not listed on the signage, because this is a former BRITISH colony, yo. (So is America, but I’m pretty sure the Brits left before they could imperialize their elevator systems on us). Of course, in American we would also have to be on the 14th floor because there IS NO 13th STORY, DUH!! Did no one here read Sideways Stories from Wayside School?

While procrastinating on your senior thesis, buy plane tickets for 2 weeks to Philly.  Tell Facebook immediately.

Make a countdown-till-you’re-in-Philly clock webpage, using your CS skillz for silly and not evil.

When the time comes, pack 7 outfits: 5 for daytime, 2 for partying only, and your workout clothes.  Bring your makeup.

Have 2 groups of friends in Philly each with their own house in two different neighborhoods, and spend ~50% of nights at each house, in order to a) maximally confuse everyone as to your location and b) not wear out your welcome.

Head to New York with your Best Fucking Friend and one more friend, and walk around the financial district, realizing the friend you’re crashing with is an analyst on Wall Street and thus the 1%.  Make jokes about how you will occupy his apartment tomorrow.

Notice lots of NYC stereotypes on the subway. [Pictured: businessman, sleeping asian lady.]

Sit on a bench and eat nuts from a street cart.  Be creeped out by the squirrel who wants to get in on it.

Go out to dinner at Union Square with an old friend and her girlfriend.  Meet up with a college friend who didn’t believe you were in NYC until you texted over some photographic evidence:  

Barhop your way around the East Village.  Talk to some strangers who turn out to be very strange. Take a cab.

In the morning, eat dosa from a street cart.  Check into it on FourSquare.

Walk through Central Park.  Climb a tree in a miniskirt.

Sit on the steps of the Met but don’t go inside — you can always do that all the future times you’ll be in NYC.

Actually occupy your friend’s apartment and sit in the dark talking all afternoon.  Watch TV.

Go out at 10 PM.  Get okonomiyaki at Otafuku because they’re sold out of takoyaki.  Get free okonomiyaki because the dude who ordered earlier never picked up his food.  Try to get into a bar on a Saturday night, but fail because it’s too crowded.

6 Follow Me by Designer Drugs Official

Go to Webster Hall to dance, and realize everyone there is 17 with fake IDs.  Get danced on by a guy who won’t go away.  Dance with a 50 year old man until it gets creepy instead of ironic.  Fall in love with DJ Jess and his adorable antics and entourage of cute stripping manic pixie dream girls.  Go upstairs to the 3rd dancefloor and sweat to Designer Drugs.

Leave the club.  Go get Ukranian food at 4 AM and take joy in the fact that it’s as crowded in a restaurant in the East Village at 4 AM as it would be at 7 PM anywhere else in the world.  Wonder if the couple next to you is on a date at 4 AM because they wake up this early or are still awake this late.  Have some perogis and cabbage soup.

Toy with the idea of staying up all night and watch the sun rise on the Brooklyn bridge, but give up, subway home and sleep instead.

Wake up and go to BRUNCH at an overpriced but delicious place in midtownish. Tweet about brunch.  Walk to Penn Station and bus back to Philly.

Meet up with friend group #2 in Philly.  Catch up on the first chunk of a year’s worth of gossip.  Hold a real gun for the first time.  Watch your friends play video games. Finally shower and change.  Head to the first of four parties that night, with EVERYONE.

Have ridiculous conversations. “Bread snob!?!?!!  It’s not even good bread!”

Exchange scandalous stories in a group of people you know extremely well and those you’ve just met.  Meet all the relevant new friends and girlfriends from the past year.

Hide in a room and try on tutus.

Head to the second party, then the third, then the fourth, which is where everyone wants to stay. Remember all the people you partied with a year and a half ago and have not talked to since.  Talk about programming.  

Watch a girl throw up on your friend’s shoes.  Talk about Japan.  Freak out that people are smoking cigarettes inside and putting them out on a wood floor. Don’t burn down the house, though.

Find out one of your new friends is in a band you have listened to before:
The War On Drugs, Come To The City by dance yrself clean 1983

The next day, don’t change out of your skirts and 3 inch heels and walk 2.5 miles to get dim sum.  Go shopping at Anthro and buy some fleece-lined leggings because both your shopping buddies say they are amazing.  Buy some $10 sneakers at Payless because you didn’t pack anything besides heels and your feet are sore.

Eat Korean, Thai, Chinese, Indian anywhere and everywhere in Center City.

Don’t respond to emails for a week and a half.

Walk between the two houses you’re staying in and realize it takes 45 minutes – learn the bus routes between them.  Sometimes spend too much money on taxis.

Watch 2 seasons of Misfits, mostly in your pajamas, and make eggs and toast and lots of tea.  Become addicted to chocolate chip meringues that your friend’s roommate made.

Camp out in front of the space heater.

Watch Breaking Bad alone in a dark and quiet house and get extremely creeped out. Catch up to your friends and lie in bed watching Breaking Bad together this time. During the credits, shout out the chemical name of each atomic symbol that appears on the screen.

Get lots of sleep because you have no bedtime and no job.

Get five people together for ice cream at Philly Flavors, and then help a new friend move a bed six blocks.  Walk with two people carrying the box-spring in front and three carrying the mattress behind.  Wonder how this is the funniest thing that’s happened yet.  Lust after a cool map in the room where the bed came from. Borrow a car and spend 20 minutes conjecturing about how to turn the lights on.  Go get cheese fries afterwards at Sketch and have the worst food hangover the next day.  Eat a cookie in the car and start a rumor that your friend stole it.

Take the bus once in your pajamas.

Take the bus once wearing pipe cleaners as glasses.

Talk to your friends about Sweden and what Zuck is like IRL, but attempt to stop yourself before they get too bored.  Learn the names of two new Berlin DJs. Listen to people’s stories from work and be fascinated because they aren’t in your field, so how this all works is news to you.

Enjoy watching the current stories unfold over the 2 weeks you spend there.

Have a hard time explaining where you are from to new people. Possible options:
- NOT Philly
- Chicago
- San Francisco, soonish
- 2-hrs-south-of-Chicago-but-just-having-graduated-traveling-for-a-bit-and-soon-to-be-san-francisco

Go running by the Schuylkill River and run up the stairs to the Art Museum because Rocky did it so you have to.

Get your hair cut, restoring it to its fully natural color for the first time in a decade. Model yourself after a minor character from Misfits.

Be excited that the weekend is here again.

Hang out at friends of friends’ apartments in West Philly.  Go to a house party in West Philly. Become surprised when someone you’ve just met asks you to produce five facts about yourself, and add that to your repertoire of slightly annoying icebreakers that can be delivered in a way involving minimal OR maximal cheesiness.

Go to a pirate drag party in Center City, dressed as a very androgynous Peter Pan.  Dance at Raven and Voyeur.  Don’t go to Voyeur before 2 AM on a Saturday. If you do, stop by for pizza next door.

Read 1000 Thought Catalog articles and obsess over Ryan O’Conn.  Make a Shit Ryan O’Connell Says video.  

Freak out when Ryan O’Connell tweets back at you that he likes your video.  Scream a lot.  Don’t care that no one else at the party knows who Ryan O’Connell is.

Hear stories about the parties you didn’t go to.  Realize that there are too many decisions to make on weekends when everyone is doing different things.  Wish you could be in 20 places at once.  Talk to a really boring wingman at the club, who reminds you of Marshall Eriksen from How I Met Your Mother.  Kind of wish you were still in Sweden where dudes don’t hit on girls in clubs.

Miss the days when more of your friends were students and didn’t have jobs and they could do stupid things all day every day with you.

Occasionally empty the dishwasher.

Use the following words: perf, trude, TWINSIES, “as per us…ual” and struggle with the spelling of that.

Eat way too much pizza.

Go on a capital-A Adventure on a Sunday afternoon.  Use alliteration.  Sneak onto some abandoned railroad tracks and take photos.  Walk around abandoned industrial areas.  Drive through North Philly and look at Temple buildings and don’t drive into sketchy alleys. Find “A Street” and drive down it.

Hop on an early morning bus with your friend to NYC again for roughly 24 hours because you feel like it.  Gossip and spend a day in a Swedish cafe and make a playlist and look for apartments in San Francisco.  

A Place To Bury Strangers “In Your Heart” (Cereal Spiller Remix) by Cereal Spiller

Village it up at night and realize NYC is crazy because not only are things crowded at 4 AM they are also crowded on Monday nights. Try on some $300 headphones and listen to a song you’ve never heard before. Realize hearing city noises in the morning is essential for your happiness.

Miss your bus and stand in the rain trying to catch another one to Philly. When you arrive, find the Korean Taco Truck.

Get your boots complimented on by a boy much younger than you while buying wine.

Do a photo shoot with random props.  Sit at home and talk to people as they come home from work.  Talk about your enemies from middle school and look them up on Facebook. Celebrate when they look like losers and rage when they look like mild successes.

Hug everyone and get weirdly emotional about saying goodbye even though you’ve only been here two weeks. Have traumatic flashbacks to leaving Sweden and CA this summer. Be genuinely surprised when more than one person mentions that they may one day come visit in San Francisco, because you’ve never lived anywhere before where people might want to visit.

Feel like you could continue living here as a bum indefinitely.

Eat some nutella before bed.

Remember to pack the dress you left here a year ago in your suitcase this time.

I’m currently just past the halfway mark of my Software Engineering Internship at Facebook. People often ask me what it’s like working at Facebook, so I may as well start writing it down. For background, I’m on the Profile team and I’ve been here since the beginning of June.

So here we go, Chapter 1: WTF is so good about industry (other than $$)?

I didn’t really get the appeal of industry before this summer. Until now, I have been somewhat solidly in the academia camp. I did REUs at Carnegie Mellon and UC Santa Cruz the past two summers, both of which I enjoyed greatly. Work was fun, interesting, and laid-back.

However, back at school (UIUC), most top Computer Science students seem to have little interest in academia, which always sort of mystified me. I saw mostly similarities between industry and academia – like that you get to work on hard problems that you [hopefully] find interesting. Industry involves bigger bags of money certainly, but there’s no way that explains what I perceive as an almost complete disinterest in academia – most kids I know in CS are definitely not in it for the money anyway…maybe they just hate school?

So I considered my summer at Facebook partially an experiment to determine what people actually like so much about industry. Results: semi-conclusive.

I’m in Your News Feed

One afternoon around 3 PM of my 3rd week at Facebook, I was in the middle of some work and refreshed my news feed. The first or second story in my feed was from one of my friends in Sweden who had just updated part of his profile. I glanced over the story, and then basically did a doubletake. WAIT a MINUTE, that story seemed a little TOO familiar. I realized it used code I had written over a couple of days the previous week. And it was now on real, live Facebook…

NO WAY!!!

It had never occurred to me to be concerned with how long it would take from starting work and getting code on Real Live Facebook… Turns out, it was about a week – half a week if you discount the few days of orientation at the beginning where I wasn’t writing code.

A week!? I had never even written or read a line of php before coming to Facebook.

“Move fast and break things” is the Facebook engineers’ catchphrase, but it’s also thanks to the release engineers / release infrastructure that we, as engineers, can actually do so. I am impressed.

Building Stuff People Use

Merely getting code shipped fast is not something I can see myself getting super-excited about though. The essence of the awesomeness I felt here was that I made something and a few days later SOMEONE I KNOW is using it, and bonus, I actually get to SEE them use it. This was so exciting and motivating, and I think it’s the key to industry for me – there was no moment in either of my previous two internships that had the same oomph, simply because there was no way to immediately and definitively see that what I was working on was USEFUL because it was being USED, then and there. Perhaps my work had the same or greater long-term impact, but there was no way for me to tell in a concrete, non-theoretical way. Hmm.

So this realization does sort of limit my employment interests to a couple of rows of icons of iPhone apps — I no longer am interested in working for a company unless I use their product a lot. But given that, and the fact that my level of Facebook addiction over the past 6 months may have, at some point, reached clinical insanity, I’d say coming here for the summer was probably a good call.

The concept:
- Put 2000 exchange students from around Scandinavia on a boat
- Get them really really drunk, whilst boat sails by night from Stockholm to Tallinn, Estonia
- Dump 2000 hungover exchange students in Tallinn for 8 hours
- Bring them back on the boat before they regain consciousness and get into too much former-soviet trouble
- Get them really drunk, again, as boat sails by night back to Stockholm

There are a couple of different party cruises available to Lund exchange students — I chose Sea Battle because it seemed like the biggest one, and also because I figured I wouldn’t ever make it to Tallinn otherwise.

I’m On a Boat

Here was our boat:

Here is where I slept, on the boat, with 3 other Lund exchange students:

The boat has something like 4 bars and 2 clubs and stuff is just open all night. The decor was so over-the-top trying to look “clubby” that it just felt ridiculous. Club before the storm of dancing exchange students:

This is an accurate representation of what was going on on the boat, from about 1 hour after boarding, until 6 AM.

Seriously, we had free food & drinks at 8 PM, and it was sort of unbelievable how drunken and loud people were before dinner even STARTED. It would have been super obnoxious if I didn’t have a close friend with whom I could roll my eyes. It was sort of like being in the nautical version of the party scene in every high school/college movie ever.

So fun times, but there was one GIANT problem with the boat: no cell phone reception, plus 2000 people, plus enormous boat, means once you lose your friends, they’re GONE. You just have to hope you run into them again. I lost my friend Alex and didn’t find him from midnight the first night until like 9 PM the second night. Really, I don’t understand how people functioned in society before cell phones… you could just, LOSE PEOPLE! If you forgot to make a meeting time/place for next time, you might just NEVER SEE THEM AGAIN! Oh man, I am so dependent on technology.

Tallinn
Woke up, looked outside, saw ICE:

I left the boat alone, because after partying with 2000 people really the last thing I wanted to do was hang out with the same people. Plus, I love exploring new cities solo and doing whatever I want. I had a bunch of tips from my friend Tack who is a Tallinn local now. Other than meeting up with him for lunch (which was delicious — other people on the boat were complaining about the food in Estonia… clearly they were going to the wrong places), I did a bunch of things by Tack’s suggestion. Here they are in picture form, and written down for posterity:

1. Sadama Market – it’s full of stuff! And exposed me to my first Estonian conversations, where I smiled and nodded a lot. Lots of Russian dolls everywhere at Sadama. So in general, that whole “you’re not in Kansas/Sweden anymore” feeling.

2. Climb to the top of Oleviste Kirik – this was my touristy thing of the day. Oleviste Kirik is the church that’s the tallest visible thing when you look at Tallinn from far away (such as in this picture):

Climbing it was awesome. However, you do get kind of dizzy walking up a staircase like this for 20 minutes:

But totally worth it because you are rewarded with this view:

Tallinn is so adorable! (Well, at least Old Town, the part I got to see).

3. Raekoja Plats – peoplewatching and listening to the different languages tourists are speaking.

4. Vabaduse väljak (freedom square) for more peoplewatching and meeting up with Tack for lunch. Nearby, I found a good wall where I could get my Jordan Catalano on.

5. Wandering a bunch of little streets, hunting for cafes in which to use wifi.

6. Climbing Toompea hill and finding more good views.

And that was all I really had time for in Tallinn! But it was lovely, not very cold, and amazingly pleasant to walk around solo for a day. I also bought a pirate hat. Can’t do better than that.

Back on the Boat

Night 2 on the boat was was more chill than night 1. People hung out in their cabins instead of dancing wildly at the clubs.

The only bad part of the trip, however, was the bus ride back from Stockholm to Lund. It’s a 7 hour bus ride, and if that isn’t painful enough, there were 4 guys right in front of me who drank the ENTIRE ride back. They went through three bottles of vodka and probably 20 beers… witnessing 7 hours of unshowered guys drinking alcohol and singing/shouting the entire time too. One of the most disgusting experiences of my life!

As always, more pictures of Tallin on Flickr!

Sweden in the spring is magical. (Allegedly, summer is even better, but I won’t be able to report on that.)

In the last two to three weeks, the sun has come out, the trees have blossomed, the weather has warmed up to a balmy 20 degrees…and most importantly, everyone has gone into permanent spring picnic mode.

Every piece of grass or bench or seat outside in Stortorget is covered with PEOPLE. If it’s the weekend, they’re sitting in the park, drinking (see: Valborg, this Saturday), otherwise they’re just sitting outside. On big rocks, overlooking Stockholm, until 9 PM when it finally starts to think about getting dark.

It has become our full-time job to enjoy the weather.

Actually, I totally forgot spring was coming.

It’s not that the winter in Skåne was even that bad. Since January, it was consistently 0 degrees and grey — not that cold, by my standards. I never even used my heaviest jacket once. But when I arrived, everything was covered in grey ice, the sky was grey, the sun set at 4 PM, and it never even got totally light out.

I got so used to the consistently dreary weather (2.5 months straight of exactly the same weather?) that spring seemed like something that only happens in other countries, like SUVs, carpeting, and hip-hop.

But then it happened, almost overnight. All term, I’ve had Swedish class from 5-7:30 PM — it used to be dark long before I even walked to class. Suddenly, now it’s light for hours after I come home.

The whole country is in SUCH A GOOD MOOD.

And oh man, the grilling. It’s been going on for WEEKS. Grilling is big here. Like, constant 4th of July-mode level big.

(Actually, I think we jumped the gun on the grilling a little bit — it was an odd experience to stand around in the light at 8 PM, grilling a pineapple, in my winter coat.)

(Yes, you can grill pineapples.)

It’s no accident that Easter break is happening now, followed a week later by Valborg. After 9 months of winter, we have earned the right to enjoy the weather.

As my friend Polly says, “I now understand why ancient cultures worshipped the sun.”

The sun is here and it’s time to celebrate.

I think spring celebration is something I was missing out on in the US. I mean, we occasionally would sit on the quad, and I remember quite a few pleasant warm evenings eating pizza on apartment balconies, feet up. But Japan has hanami, Sweden has Valborg… I am missing the American equivalent here.

Then again, maybe it’s because Illinois has exactly 1.5 days of good weather before we go into hot&humid or tornado mode, or maybe it’s because spending more than an hour outside means my allergies will cause my immune system to self-destruct.

Point is, byebye seasonal affective disorder, hello a month straight of chilling outside. The music festival Popadelica wrote in a recent Facebook status, “Förresten, sa vi att vi bokat solen till Popadelica 2011 också? Det har vi.” (“Btw, did we mention we’ve booked the sun for Popadelica 2011? Well we did.”) NICE.

Only bummed that I’m leaving too soon for midsommar and the midnight sun…

I bought a couple hair magazines, looking for short, Swedish-looking styles, and the one that kept recurring was some variety of this Robyn look. Or this one. Sounds good, I thought.

No one I knew had any salon recommendations in Lund, so I sort of randomly chose Klipphuset downtown.

My hairdresser was a middle-aged woman who really didn’t speak English (everyone in Lund speaks perfect English…except for my hairdresser!) So, the number of ways I could describe what I wanted was rather limited. I could basically say:

- I want it very different
- I want it like these pictures
- I am sick of having lots of hair

She was very skeptical of my haircut desires. She kept being like “your hair is so thick, it will end up SO short and SO manly…”

She then tried to get me to pick a different hairstyle and I kind of sat there awkwardly for a while, not choosing one. She was like “Do you want to think about it and come back?” At which point I said something to the effect of “No. I want a haircut now, short is ok and manly is ok.” And then she sighed and said “Okay, well, we’ll try.”

Then, halfway through the haircut, she started getting really into it, and was all, “what if we do this side really short and leave this side long, it’ll be asymmetrical!” Oh, NOW you get into it?! Well, whatever, I think she succeeded.

And +1 language accomplishment — definitely one of the first times I felt like “Phew, good thing I’ve been vaguely learning Swedish for the past three months.”

Before:

After:
(apologies for inconsistency of mirror vs. non-mirror pics)

With straightening

Action shot with Jennifer!

And, when necessary:

1. The knife magnet

So much easier than those stupid things you stick the knives in and then can’t see their relative size and/or if they’re serrated… magnets for knives appear to be more common here.

2. The cheese slicer

EVERY kitchen has not one, but MANY cheese slicers. Giant blocks of cheese? No problem, still make a convenient snack. No knives and cutting boards to mess around with. Swedish friend was astounded we don’t have these. HOW DO WE SLICE CHEESE!?? It’s a hard life in the US.

Apparently, cheese slicers are a Scandinavian invention.

3. The disco ball

Because festing is an important part of Swedish culture. Almost, but not quite, as important as IKEA. But you don’t have to choose, since Swedes get to fest right in their IKEA-decked-out kitchens.

This may be a good time to bring up the fact that there will, in fact, be a fest in MY korridor tonight. The very disco ball pictured above will be there. So should you. I’ll be there around 11 maybe, but you can text me. If you bring any cheese, you’ll be all set.

However, I did find another major Scandinavian attraction that’s almost as good: a candy store.

Behold:

Since I haven’t explained, candy in Sweden is definitely a “thing”. Every grocery store, 7-11, or other convenience store has an entire aisle devoted to candy in bins that you scoop out. I think there’s actually two candy aisles in the smallish ICA I shop at. You get a bag and buy it by weight. It’s cheap, and grown adults can often be seen doing this too, not just children.

Here’s what the candy bags from ICA look like:

And one might choose an assortment like this:

However, the candy store pictured above puts ICA and 7-11 to shame. There’s 3 huge rows of lösgodis (the candy in bins), as well as packaged candy.

Check out that entire WALL of bilar in the background:

(Bilar, for those of you who don’t know, is Sweden’s best-selling car. Even more popular than Volvo:)

I can’t really offer advice on WHICH candy to buy — typically I put in just one or two pieces of anything that looks mildly appetizing into my bag (lösgodis is very low-risk, it’s the speed-dating of candy…) and 80% turns out to be edible, and 20% turns out disgusting (to me, anyway. Swedes are really into licorice and it has a tendency to pop up when you least expect it).

For more advanced blogging about lösgodis and why you eat candy on Saturdays check out these two posts on Welcome to Sweden.

No color-changing lights? The packaged candy feels ignored

For all I know, this is an average everyday candy store in Sweden, but to my untrained American eye, it was like walking into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

They also have a whole row of kitschy toy-like candy (think 1000 variations on ring-pops).

They also sell cigarettes.

How to find this magical place:
The store is called “Candy People” and located at Bankgatan 6 (downtown). Walk in, grab a bag and a plastic shovel. Thank me for your next sugar rush.

5 days is a rather long time to tour one city, so I’ll skip the storytelling (about how it was awesome to meet up with friends from UIUC, Lund, etc.), and just go with a list of things that were cool and might help you plan your own trip to Amsterdam.

Good Things to Do

1. Canal Tours

On day one, we took the City Canal Cruise which leaves from Leidseplein and takes you all around the city through the major canals, and even out to the harbor. It was great except that the recording for the tour was broken, so we didn’t actually learn what most things were that we were passing. However, most of the sights we saw on the tour became landmarks we used later to help us navigate.

Where the bout tours started

I’m on a boat

Harbor!

2. Openbare Bibliotheek (The Library)

By FAR my favorite place in Amsterdam. Olga recommended it to me and I only wish I went earlier — free internets, nice interior design, food, and a great view of the city. I went 3 times in 4 days. Plus, the library is just a short walk from the Centraal Station, so NO ONE HAS AN EXCUSE NOT TO GO. It’s open kinda late, too!

Lots of construction approaching the library from the station side

inside

Nice setup

STUDY-POD

Bathroom costs 20 euro-cents but it’s worth EVERY EURO-PENNY.

Library elevator hyperjump.

3. The Red Light District

When recommending places to go in Amsterdam, people tend to be weird about *sort of* recommending this place but not ACTUALLY… (maybe they’re worried that if they say to go here, I will think they hired a hooker?) Anyway, I would like to unambiguously say YES, do go there — it is fascinating!

BUT, be warned, that there are not only prostitutes there, but LOTS OF SWANS.

For some reason it didn’t occur to me that there would be actual red lights all around… The main street, with the canal running through, and the tiny, red side streets, was quite pretty. Definitely go there on a Friday or Saturday night, so the district is in full force. Every street (especially the smaller side-streets) has prostitutes standing in windows (as expected). However, there were a few unexpected things:

- If you make a lot of eye contact or walk really close to the windows, the girls start to tap the glass at you. A little eerie.

- On the other hand, about half of the window hookers look incredibly bored and are on their cell phones, texting, or reading facebook, or trading stocks, whatever it is that you do when you’re a hooker in between customers

- Many of them were actually quite attractive

- A lot of the side-streets were narrow enough that it was hard for two people to pass on either side of each other without careful coordination – which is especially challenging if you are busy gawking at the prostitutes less than two feet away.

- Swans.

4. Live Music at Dam Square

There was almost always live music going on here, and it was pretty good! Also a good place to just hang out, people watch, eat food, etc. (I always love finding those places in big cities).

5. Heineken Museum

It was kinda cool — the reason this isn’t higher on my list is that what made it cool was the nice interior design of the brewery/museum, which was greatly surpassed by the awesomeness of the Bibliotheek. So, you can definitely skip the beer thing by just going to the library.

They had some cool chairs though.

6. The Best Tree in Vondelpark

We found the best one. I can’t really tell you where it is, but it’s sorta far into the park. You’ll find it. Good for watching bike tours go by, but watch out, the kids can get pretty territorial and you have to really defend your spot in the tree.

This spot’s MINE

This kid had the sweetest ride

7. Shopping on Kalverstraat

One of the big pedestrian shopping streets in Amsterdam. There are a bajillion shoe stores (LOVE), and I found exactly the boots I have been looking for all winter but haven’t found in Sweden, at a store called Manfield.

I also got a dress somewhere that had cute, cheap clothes, and the LONGEST QUEUE for the dressing room EVER. Every single girl except for me was there with a boyfriend and she would come out of the changing room, model, ask if it made her arms look fat, contemplate for minutes, and then move on to the next item.

WAY worse than the infamous queues at the Anne Frank Museum.

8. ROBYN @ MELKWEG!!!

This would be first on my list of course, but unfortunately Robyn is not ALWAYS in Amsterdam, so it doesn’t really work as an Amsterdam tourism tip.

Just as predicted, Robyn was a friggin’ awesome live performer. She clearly loved her music and performing just as much as we loved watching her — no diva vibe from her! She danced around (yes, on her own), and we danced along right with her.

My travel buddy Philip has a magic power: weaving through a crowd like no other (Swedish queueing skillz in full force), so we quickly made it to the very front.

Everyone behind us — suckers!

<3

“Hang With Me” was the clear winning song, but everything else was wonderful as well. So perfect.

At the end of the show, we found out that everyone else at the front of the crowd was also Swedish (I’m serious about this queueing thing), because we were all shouting “EN GÅNG TILL!!!” which is what you shout to get an encore… in SWEDISH. The girl next to me and her friends turned out to all be from Luleå, and we met a couple from Stockholm as well. After the concert, we were suddenly a gang of 12 Swedes (and one American, of course) and we went galavanting around Amsterdam for hours together. THANKS ROBYN! Best last night in Amsterdam ever.

Food

- Thaise Snackbar Bird – Really really good thai food. We ate here twice in the 5 days we were in Amsterdam. It’s tiny though, so you always end up sitting next to strangers. Sometimes, very very high strangers.

- Fries sold in paper cones on the streets – the mayo looks gross but it was actually quite good. Everyone seems to be walking around with a cone of fries, it’s hard not to want one yourself.

- Stroopwafel McFlurries – I really only go to McDonalds to experience local McDelicacies, but this is by far the best item I have ever found at McDonalds. Stroopwafels themselves are one of the best things in the world — I have been enjoying them for years and I had no idea they were Dutch! This is how you eat a stroopwafel.

There was no other restaurant that compared in any way to Thai Snackbar, but if you want other recommendations, check out Spotted by Locals Amsterdam – they know what they’re talking about.

Bars and Nightlife

Bulldog Hostel – After we found our crowd of Swedes at Robyn, we ended up hanging out at the hostel bar here until like 4 am – there was no bartender for miles around, but no one seemed to care that we were there.

Cafe Mokum – in Leidseplein, a long but narrow bar with a platform at the back and a lot of dancing. And man, were people dancing. Unfortunately, it closed at 2 AM on Sunday night (how dare they?) so we had to move down the street to…

Bubbels — which was definitely the Amsterdam equivalent of Joe’s, complete with the annoying DJs who turn the music down so you can yell along with the song. Additionally, the bartenders had these bells they would ring randomly. Incredibly obnoxious. This club, however, was the first place in Amsterdam I found where people couldn’t speak English. LOTS of Dutch yelling.

Male attention in Amsterdam… PLENTY to go around. In Sweden, getting a guy at a bar to even give you the time of day requires a powerful magic love incantation — not so in Amsterdam (or at least in this club). Don’t make eye contact for more than 1 second with anyone unless you are INTERESTED. And if you’re a guy, the drink-buying competition is fierce — Philip reports seeing guys buying beers at the bar, turning around, and shoving them at literally THE FIRST GIRL they see, before anyone else can get to her. Actually, the guys at this club made the jerks at Joe’s seem totally tame. Whoa.

The dancing situation in Amsterdam was halfway between Barcelona and Sweden. No grinding of course, no circles of people (like in Sweden), but people were actually dancing (unlike in Barcelona) — just not in any particular formation. The timeframe of going out was also halfway between Sweden and Barcelona — people seemed to go out at 12ish and clubs would close at 4.

Stuff that was Meh

Really the only thing we did in Amsterdam that was skippable was the Anne Frank House. It was sorta cool, but wayyy too touristy and corporate. I felt like just reading the book made so much more of an impression on me than visiting the museum ever could. My two cents.

For many more pictures…

Of Amsterdam and even my mini-adventure to Roosendaal, see my Flickr.

I was traveling with one friend, and we stayed at Sant Jordi Alberg which was apparently the 6th best hostel in the world in 2009, which sets the bar pretty high. Indeed, it was quite nice, and small enough that you could meet people without feeling anonymous. Every night the hostelers go out and party together, and usually you don’t have to pay cover at the clubs if you go with the hostel group. More on clubs later.

Barcelona Attractions
We had 3 full days to explore, which was to see all the main things there are to see. Some were good, some were not so good.

1. El Gòtic, the Gothic Quarter, was nice. Lots of street musicians, narrow streets, lots of people walking around. Also, this was the only place in all of Barcelona that we found horchata, for some reason. Lack of horchata (especially when it was on the menu and then they claimed they didn’t have it) was a major source of angst this weekend.

2. Park Güell, the Gaudi Park, was actually a bit underwhelming, but it’s at the top of a hill on the very edge of the city, so you do get some good views from there:

I think after living in Kobe, I just get really excited about any mountain-city-ocean situation.

3. Magic Fountain of Montjuïc was probably the most epic thing in all of Barcelona. It is also surrounded by another row of epic fountains and a huge museum with beams of light behind it. This place is the best.

Row of fountains

And the actual fountain, in video form (coordinated with music):

4. The Sagrada Familia was cool, especially the inside (the outside is bizarre looking but not nearly as stunning as the inside):

Sadly, the towers were closed to visitors the day we went.

5. Las Ramblas, the big shopping street, was stupid. It was completely filled with slow-moving tourists and street vendors trying to rip them off. There wasn’t even anything cool to buy, either. Definitely can skip.

The Barcelona Metro
The metro was incredibly and unexpectedly good. Here’s what made it great:
- it’s well designed / easy to use
- the trains come very frequently (every 4-5 minutes maximum)
- the clocks on the platforms tell you when the next train is coming TO THE SECOND… not minute, but SECOND. I’ve never seen that before
- it’s clean
- in many of the stations there are little shops selling cheap yet really useful things. I bought a white circle scarf (see above photo) and a purse in two of these stops. My scarf is just like the ones everyone in Sweden has, and yet it was much easier to find one in a random Barcelona metro stop than in Sweden. Go figure. It felt really weird buying winter accessories when it was still warm there, but since it’s Barcelona, 20 degrees meant everyone was freezing and wearing winter coats and boots, etc. Hahaha.

Spanish Party Time
It was amazing how fast we assimilated to Spanish Party Time — everything in Spain starts and ends very late, and everything in Sweden starts and (sometimes) ends in Lund much earlier. The first night we were in Barcelona, we asked Duda, one of the staff at the hostel (with a really great name) what time to be around for that evening’s activities. He told us 11 PM as the meeting time, aka pre-party start time. So our daily routine was always something like:

explore the city during the day/evening
8:30~10 PMish – get dinner
11:00 PM – be at the hostel, get ready to go out
11:30 PM – leave hostel for first bar
2:00 AM – leave first bar to go to club
5:30 AM – leave club
and then sleep in until 12:30 or 1:30 PM

So we were first stepping foot in a club right when the clubs in Lund are closing. Jeez. This also meant I had significant “jet lag” coming back to Sweden, despite the fact that Barcelona and Sweden are in the same time zone. Oops.

People Don’t Dance in Barcelona Clubs
I was extremely surprised by this. I expected everywhere to be a massive rave all the time. Instead, what I got were a series of ENORMOUS clubs (all at least 4x the size of the largest club I’d ever been to before this) where there are one or more huge huge huge dancefloors that are incredibly crowded, but instead of dancing, everyone is just kind of standing and drinking and talking (yelling) at their friends. I don’t quite get the point of being in a club in that case…?

The queues for these clubs are also enormous — like 200+ people at a time, but it takes just 10 minutes or so to get into the club. SO fast! In the queue to Razzmatazz on Saturday night around 3:15 AM, one of the biggest clubs in Barcelona, we actually ran into our friend from Lund. We knew he was coming to Barcelona that weekend too, but it was quite odd that we ran into him in a queue at the same time and same club, and furthermore that I actually spotted him in that line. Crazy!

Spanish in Barcelona
I didn’t know any before this trip, and I still don’t really know any (and I definitely didn’t know Catalan!) You can really get by on just a couple of words. Everyone did seem to know English (especially in restaurants, etc.) but unlike in Sweden, where they just switch to English as soon as they figure out you’re foreign, they actually use Spanish with everyone here. If you need missing vocab though, saying it in English usually did the trick.

What you CANNOT do is ask them to speak in English. Everyone will say no to that and some people will take offense.

So Many Americans
For some reason, every single person in our hostel other than a Japanese brother/sister pair, was American, mostly students studying abroad elsewhere in Spain or in France. I forgot that I hadn’t been in a group of more than 3 Americans at a time in a month and a half, so it was strange to suddenly be meeting people from Minnesota instead of Munich.

There were lots of foreigners at the clubs too, and several times someone would come up to me attempting to make conversation, but then panicked at the last minute, as if they had just realized that they didn’t know any Spanish. Surprise! I don’t know Spanish either. I also managed to find a Japanese guy who appeared not to speak either Spanish or English. See how useful it is to just-so-happen to speak Japanese?

However, I did notice that Swedish is starting to interfere with my Japanese too — I would think in Japanese and sometimes Swedish words (that I use very commonly) would come into my head. So either this means I’m making progress on Swedish, or I’m just getting confused.

Other Upcoming Travels
I’ve soaked enough sunlight up in Barcelona to tide me over until real spring happens in Sweden (I’m still optimistic that it will, in fact, happen). So now, my travels will be motivated not by weather but by live music: Amsterdam for Robyn, Berlin for I Blame Coco, and Copenhagen once more just for kicks, should round out March. April and May are relatively wide open, and I hope to get some more serious Scandinavian adventures going on then.

The full set of Barcelona pictures here!