Submitted by Marina Roos on the 2017 winter session program in London, England sponsored by the Department of English and the Department of Theatre…
For the past four days, I was traveling in Amsterdam. A group of my friends and I decided to stay in a hostel. While we were there, we made some Dutch friends. They told us about all the good food places and the attractions we needed to visit. We were told that we had to try this dish called Kibbeling so we went to a Dutch restaurant and ordered it. Kibbeling is battered and deep fried morsels of white fish and it was absolutely delicious. We also took a canal tour around the city and saw some of the Netherlands’ oldest buildings, like one building that was constructed in the 1500’s! It was really interesting to walk around in Amsterdam because everyone is either walking or riding a bike. There are not that many cars and buses on the roads so it is very different than London. Amsterdam is also much quieter and slower than London is, no one is really in any rush. One thing that was very similar to London was that it is very offensive to show up late to something. The people feel that since they are taking time out of their day to do a service for you than it is very rude to keep them waiting. When we signed up for the canal tour, we were told to show up at least ten minutes early so we needed to give ourselves at least 30 minutes to find our way there. In Amsterdam, none of us had cellular data so we couldn’t use our phones as a GPS. We walked around with a map and found everything perfectly fine. It was cool to be disconnected from social media for the day and take in everything around me. Amsterdam was such a good experience!
