After seven hours, we had crossed Belgium into the Netherlands. It would have been four or five, if not for the constant bathroom + food stops we made. I feel better about being less fit than everyone walking to school - I am damn good at sitting still for hours. Two hours is nothing, you of feeble ass. Thank you to LA car culture and international flights to Taipei for building up my butt endurance.
It's stranger still to think that in the same amount of time it takes for a spontaneous trip to Vegas, you can visit another country. We'd wake up at a gas station, whispering, "Are we still in France? What country is this?" and deduce from the souvenirs on sale where we were. Plastic Eiffel Towers? Still in France.
It was international travel at its most unassuming. No road signs, no border control checking your trunk for stowaway bananas. Just: these buildings look kind of Amsterdam-y.
A beautiful city, but a city that was being lived in. The aging walls reinvented by layer upon layer of event posters, street art, the fingerprints of hundreds of passersby. Never mind the details of what I did, although biking through sideways rain must never be repeated - Amsterdam, you were sometimes overwhelming but always pulsing with life, and that's the best thing a city can be.
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