#So Dutch

Before I give you the low down on today's events, Whitney said that the goal of today was to "catch the flavor of Amsterdam," and I would say that is something we did successfully. I would also say that we walked at least five miles today if not more and that my feet are tired.

Amsterdam doesn't really sleep. We did, but ambient street noise flooded into our room all night plus Whitney and I both thought we were going crazy because we heard music ALL night. It turned out to be the people across the hall from us, who had not only been at it all night, but had their door open as well (we discovered this at 8:30 am, by the way). Another major event that took place before we'd truly started our day was us blowing the fuse in our room; stupid Americans over here, sorry not sorry.

When we took the streets at about 8:35 (post hallway and dead lights situations), they were empty. We wanted to get an early start to our day and were thinking breakfast and a canal tour, but not only were there no people to be seen, nothing was open! The trash in the street was piled high as well, it was really scary in a way. Back to the no food situation, we almost starved! The first canal tours of the day don't leave until 9 and since we'd been planning a stop, we were there super duper early, which led us to walk around until we did finally find some place to eat and then it was back to the docks for the 100 Highlights Canal Tour.

Did we actually see 100 Highlights? I'm not sure. We really wanted to see Amsterdam by canal and this was our best bet (ok, research pretty much says that it was our only bet, but that isn't the point). Being on the water was a lovely way to start the day, the boat was bad for taking pictures, but we got off to a good start.

After our tour, we realized that Amsterdam would be really easy to navigate...if we actually knew where we wanted to go; since we didn't have any particular sights that we wanted to see today, we didn't have any destinations to navigate towards, so we ran back to the hostel for a bit to regroup.

Our selected destinations included Amsterdam's Cat Boat and Tulip Market, so we moseyed that way. You know what I said about nothing opening? Yeah, the cat boat -- a floating animal shelter for Amsterdam's stray kitties -- was closed. They didn't open until 1! And we were there at 12:25... So after all we had done to hunt it down, we just turned around and went to the Tulip Market. The Tulip Market was quite a successful stop for us, although relatively uneventful... They sell flowers there, not much else, ya know?

We had waffles as our lunch/afternoon snack. That, like french fries on the side of the street, is a thing here. Pancakes are also a thing, but we have yet to have those. I got my waffle with ice cream and Whitney got hers with nutella and banana and these totally annihilated the crepes we had in France.

Better than any crepe with ice cream could have been

We visited the Vincent Van Gogh Museum to kill some time in the afternoon. The dude was like the king of the selfie. I mean, seeing his art up close was unreal, but seriously. "But first, let me paint a selfie."

Now, with those things being said and done, the real mission for today was to find the perfect souvenirs. While we had avoided any/all souvenir shops in Paris like the plague, if it was orange, then we were looking for it because we needed to get prepped for the world cup! This hunt also led to the eventual coining of our own hashtag #SoDutch which we proceeded to use to describe anything we did for the rest of the day.

We knew from the start that the main event of the day was going to be watching the Netherlands play Chile in the FIFA World Cup in The Museumplein -- where all of Amsterdam was planning on being -- so those orange clothes were a must. Why is everything in Amsterdam orange? I don't know, but I've come to the conclusion that it's either orange or phallic here.

I had a harder time finding the perfect shade of traffic cone to wear today, but eventually Whitney and I both had some Amsterdam swag to wear at the game. I looked like a pumpkin.

Is this the Dutch version of Americana?

Now, am I a soccer fan? No. Am I a FIFA fan? Casually. But when you have the opportunity to go watch a major sporting event/celebration like this for free, you take it, because we can come back to Amsterdam, but we won't have another 2014 World Cup.

We got to The Museumplein at 4:30. The game did not start until 6. They took "a free official photo" of us when we arrived and that should be online by tomorrow, so I'm excited to see how that turned out. In the time before the game started, we were able to get a really great introduction to Dutch pop music and radio, which is kind of similar to American pop music in that you go this is really stupid...and now I'll be singing it for the rest of my life. We were also able to grab some Heineken (#SoDutch).

Since they were speaking in Dutch and I had no idea what they were saying, I decided that I would just go ahead and cheer whenever the people around me did...which made it exactly like every other major sporting event I've ever gone to.

So, have I mentioned the Dutch obsession with orange yet? Because I really don't think I will ever be able to properly describe it. The amount of orange at this thing was enough to make Tropicana look pale. Thousands of people. Wearing orange. It was a very vibrant experience.

Sew oranje.

Completely worn out from all of the walking and game day excitement, Whitney and I decided to leave at half time -- quite the challenging endeavor -- when the score was 0-0. On our walk home, we passed all sorts of restaurants and bars that were playing the game and we were able to hear the celebrating when Amsterdam scored their first goal. When we got back to the bar at our hostel, they were playing the Australia/Spain game for some inexplicable reason, but the Netherlands won the game 2-0, which was #SoDutch.