Today, day one of our trip was very long. After a 20-hour travel day, we got to Amsterdam and hit the ground running. First was navigating the underground subway in order to get to the canal tour, where we got a good look at the city from a different perspective. Our tour guide talked a lot about the leaning buildings. This is mostly due to the soft soil on which the houses were built. The houses are narrow due to the way houses are taxed in the Netherlands. The longer a house is, the more you must pay in taxes, so many of the houses are narrow so they pay as little in taxes as possible. This makes it very difficult to move furniture and things in your house, so the Dutch attach a pulley system to the top of their house to lift furniture and other necessities to the upper floors.

After our canal tour, we had a few hours of free time before a walking tour of the city and a chocolate taste-testing. During this free time, we decided to go to the tulip museum. There, we learned about the history of tulips in the Netherlands and how they are created and produced. Afterwards, we attended a walking tour. During this walking tour, our tour guide explained a lot of the history of Amsterdam. He showed us which buildings had been bombed during WWII, and a lot of the different businesses that helped to hide Jews away from German capture. After the tour, we attend a chocolate tasting hosted by his wife. Her goal is to make the production of chocolate more sustainable. We tried chocolate of all sorts, like fruit-flavored, dark, white, and even spicy chocolate at the end of the visit.

One major difference I noticed between Amsterdam and the United States is their roads, specifically their modes of transportation. The Netherlands’ main mode of transport is bicycling, which is a rarer sight in America. In Pittsburgh, bikes can be rented, but many people prefer to drive their cars or take the bus instead of biking or walking to their destinations. In Amsterdam, all of the roads have bike lanes that take up half the road, and the streets are lined with bicycles. Overall, Dutch people prefer to use more sustainable modes of transportation in comparison with Americans.