Besides the snow and harsh winds, this weekend in Amsterdam was beautiful.

I got a chance to catch up with my friend who was an exchange student from Norway at my high school in the United States.  It was the first time I saw her, and we just hung out a lot in her crazy dorm in Utrecht, where she’s studying international law, and I went in to Amsterdam a few times by myself.  I ended up mainly just wandering around the canals and the streets, trying to eat as much as I could, justifying it to myself because “I’m on vacation.”  I am completely in support of gaining weight in foreign countries.

I walked through the Red Light District, and the infamous prostitutes were hanging out in the windows. Almost as shocking as the fact that prostitution is legal in the Netherlands, prostitutes pay taxes and have unions etc. is the fact that a lot of them were actually quite pretty.

There were a lot of giggling, English college boys trotting around in packs and looking at me awkwardly as if to say, wait, a normal female in the Red Light District? Hey, a tourist is a tourist.

Another thing infamously legal in Amsterdam is Cannabis, so I went to the Cannabis College to check out their Cannabis nursary, because I was so, so curious as to what actual marijuana plants look like.  I’ve only ever seen plots of marijuana in documentaries, so it was kind of cool to see them out of the context of a “don’t do drugs” video, and more of an organic product…you know, that actually came from the earth.  I asked a woman working there questions about the differences in marijuana and hemp plants and she explained to me in incredible detail the medicinal purposes of marijuana.  Very, very interesting.  She referred to the Cannabis flowers as female, since they are pollinated, and asked us to “please refrain from touching the ladies.”

I had already been to the Anne Frank House and Van Gogh Museum before, but I did go back to the Van Gogh museum again, and it is always a pleasure to get to see some of his greatest works.  I wanted to go to the contemporary art museum but the weather was getting so bad that I had to go back to Utrecht.  My friend and I spent my last night walking through the snowy woods to get to this Dutch pancake house where I had a half and half cheese and apple-y pancake/crepe thing.  It was SO good.  Long live the Dutch!