The First Week: Amsterdam & Poland
After almost three years in Dublin it was time to move on. After quickly leaving the office with a giant meerkat goodbye card and a new camera, courteous from the guys at the office (thank you so much!), I was off to catch the 5.15pm Friday flight to Amsterdam. Leaving that office and Dublin so fast left a couple of loose ends and it felt like a bit of a rushed goodbyes, but the overall I just felt great to be start the adventure, first stop Amsterdam.
Amsterdam was so full of life and sounds at night the city was so alive, this was Queen’s Night the biggest party night of the year to ring in Queen’s Day in the morning. Queen’s Day or Koninginnedag in Dutch is the celebration of the Queen of the Netherlands mother’s birthday, it was created about a 100 years ago to allow a day of free trade in the Netherlands so everyone is allowed to sell anything on the streets without a licence. Musicians preform in the streets, overnight vendors freely sell beer and drinks and the entire city dresses in Orange, the national color of the football team. The party starts early in the day and ends early like around 9pm, since it typically doesn’t fall on a weekend. I think it can be best summed up as the world’s largest drunken garage sale.
The day after I spent cycling through the streets and over the canals as the city was being cleaned up. Later in the day I found the poker room at the casino and tried my skills with the Dutch and tourists, thankfully the dealers speak both languages and was always announcing the bets sizes in both when needed. I’ll going to continue to try to experience poker in each country where it is legal as long as I keep my poker-bankroll in the black.
A rest was needed after Holland and a couple of flights later I made my way to Poland. My buddy and I picked it as a close place to Slovakia that neither of us had been before. Wow, I was impressed the city is so clean and pretty, I was expecting more Soviet style architecture where everything looks the same. We toured the vast parks and the rebuilt old city and were just impressed enough we extended our stay in Warsaw for an extra couple of days and skipped out on seeing Krakow. The country was very “chill” and relaxing, the food was great I love borscht now (sorry Mom for not really trying it before) and the eat 9 different types of porgies on a single plate. The old bad experiences from the country was when we needed to get things done, it took a long time to check-in, it took us 5hrs to book train tickets since no one at the International Train Ticket Office spoke English and in general things just took a long time.
So far it has been a great first week after Dublin and I’ve been experiencing so much. It’s great to get back to into the swing of travelling it sleeping in hostels where everyone in so friendly. Most conversations all start with “Hi, I’m Bryce from Canada” and the starting topics of conversation are “where you from”, “where have been traveled”, “where are going afterwards”. I still I’m not sure how to people the best way that I quit my job to travel for the next 4+ months and I have no plans afterwards, but I bounce between I’m mini-retired to I’m an ex-computer geek to I’m a traveler wondering the globe.
Next stop the World Hockey Championships in Slovakia.
