The Maiden Voyage, Amsterdam

What better way to start the series than with the place I call hub, Amsterdam. This used to be a small fishing village and is fairly "new" for Dutch standards to be a city, places like Utrecht and Leiden are much older, but the importance of Amsterdam lies in the trade capabilities of this city.
Normally, Amsterdam is associated with prostitutes and drugs, but this is a notion that has been around since the days of the old Dutch colonies, where sailors would return after the duties with their companies to spend their hard-earned wages on prostitutes around the Oude Kerk.
Nowadays, however, you can find British tourists instead of the sailors, all the while the Italian tourist indulge on the local cannabis scene and the Germans crowd the bars and pubs from the crack of dawn.
If the nightlife is your thing, I'm sorry to disappoint but that is not my area of expertise, although there are events every week and it is not difficult to come by the social calendar of the city online.
For people enjoying food, I must say that  after 22:00 hrs it get's impossible to find anything good, the only places still open ager hours are either greasy snack bars or tourist traps designed to make unwitting or naïve, or very high people pay three or four times the price for sweets and imported junk food.
So now that we have set the times straight, the amount of incredible little food places spread around the city is huge, but finding the grain between the chaff is no easy endeavour. If there is something that Amsterdam is known for, that's the cut-throat commercial practices, easily illustrated in the Kalverstraat where you can find a McDonald's right next door to a Burger King.
In my opinion, the nicest cuisine you can find in the city is Asian.
From the Chinese and Japanese delights in the Red Light District to the Thai and Javanese in the Rozengracht on the Old West of Amsterdam. There are also plenty of lovely and cosy sushi restaurants ranging from the all-you-can-eat to the mechanised sushi bars as well as fusion with Latin flavours in an elusive food truck from Perú.
The highlights to recommend for me would be the New King in the Zeedijk, Ramen-Ya on the Oudezijds Vorburgwal and the Umaimon in the Leidseplein that specialises in chicken-based broths for its noodles.
Currently, the West-side of Amsterdam is my buurt all the way from the Harlemmerstraat and lower into the city, it is possible to have a great route that starts in the Postjesweg, then Kinkerstraat up to the Elandsgracht where the Jordaan neighborhood begins and the city center starts in the form of the Grachtengordel, the four rings that surround the old city center and were previously used to diverge the flow of the river Amstel that gives the city its name.
Until the next time...

Welcome

Hello kind reader,
You may have stumbled upon (RIP) this blog goofing around on the internet and expect to find some life-changing insight or a view that no one else has showed you. This may be the case but there are a few ground rules, or House Rules as they like calling them in the Netherlands to this dynamic.
I intend to post some new and juicy travel content, perhaps accompanied by some images and of course insider tips on to making the most out of the circumstance by teaching through examples, so if you do not agree or have something better to add, feel free to comment and enlighten us all, if you feel like being antagonistic for the lulz, sorry but your efforts fall upon deaf ears.
There may also be some rants about the contemporary world order, the quality of modern media and the coherence of news, as well as some fake news.
On the last point, when I say fake news, I derive from the genre and specifically speaking make emphasis on satire and joke headlines. As a journalist the sole thought of massively disseminating false information to confuse the masses is sickening, but that is not the whole notion of what Fake news entails. The now President of the United States has also classified satire as fake news... which is interesting because it is neither news, nor is it fake, but it is very wrong to use the tools of comedy to help those uninterested in the political happening to at least have a notion of its absurdity.
Every time I see something this ridiculous I think that all fiction is based on reality and also reality is stranger than fiction, so keep an open mind while reading this.
The one thing I will apologise in advance for is the strong feeling I have toward food and cannabis, although they are both subjects that have been over-used to the point of boredom, my passion for food comes from my family and the passion for cannabis from my job, it is a shared love that I hope to transmit and I also hope to not fall prey of the pre-conceived notion of the VICEy writer, I am not keen on making steak with marihuana butter, but I will eat a well-cooked medium rare steak and then smoke a phatt joint.
Vegan, Organic, Bio and other modern adjectives to add value to foods will not be discussed, I'm not a celiac and I believe that like most industrialised produce out of first world countries has lost touch with its roots. I was forced to slaughter my first goat when I turned fifteen in Kenya as a right of passage and a metaphor that I can raise and harvest my own food for my family... a very far notion from collecting pre-packed meat in a supermarket.
Yes, I am that annoying guy, but I also hope that you can learn a thing or two, share a thing or two and that my words are aesthetic enough to take you somewhere that lets you be wild and free, but also lets you question the establishment and find your own direction.
Captain, we're ready for take-off.