I have arrived in Amsterdam!

I arrived in Amsterdam at 11:00am on Friday, July 28th! It is amazing here, and the Dutch are incredibly hospitable. The city is absolutely beautiful! I haven't really taken many pictures yet, but I posted a few. For example, check out this street performer blowing fire in dam square:

dragon man

This was basically the first thing I saw after we dropped off our bags at the Bulldog Hostel. I was pleasantly surprised by how nice the Bulldog was. My previous mental image of a hostel was something pretty rustic with just the bare necessities. Even though I was staying in a 12 person room, it was surprisingly nice with comfortable beds and personal lockers to keep our valuables. Additionally there is a lounge in the hostel that is for guests only. It serves breakfast and has big comfortable couches with a plasma TV playing movies. Overall I was very impressed with the hostel experience.

Even though I enjoyed the staying in the hostel, I am glad to have moved into my new dorm room. It is ridiculously big compared to any dorm rooms at UW, which is weird because everything that I have read about Holland has indicated that the Dutch typically have very compact living quarters.

my dorm room

Overall, things have been excellent over here, and I am loving this city! You can expect many more posts, and I also hope to take a lot more photos, so keep your eyes on my flickr account. I put a link on the side so that people can subscribe to my photo feed with a program like iPhoto (I'm not sure what photo podcast software there is available windows). Finally, if you didn't notice under my links, I have added this cool flickr script that shows the three most recent photos that I have uploaded.