I love Amsterdam- but it is nice to see how real people in the Netherlands live. It appears the entire nation is bike crazy. There are bike freeways along the car freeways. There are more bikes than cars even "out in the sticks." This is truly a utopian blend of trains and bikes- and if you are really adventurous, you can take a boat almost anywhere as well. This entire country could survive without fossil fuels. It saddens me to compare any of europe to the US in this regard. Minneapolis is one of the more progressive cities, and yet it has a fraction of the bike culture as a european city a tenth its size. It is strange seeing a grocery store with bikes all over the place, and 60-something women loading groceries in cheap vinyl panniers for her ride home. The stop lights have separate greens for bikes, allowing them a head start. Did I mention that beer is cheaper than bottled water? On an unrelated note, the Netherlands should team up with Kazakhstan to trade some of their vowels for some Kazakhstani consonants. The Dutch like teaming up vowels like no other language. I have seen some huge words with only two or three non-vowels: even a simple word like mooie, the definitive adjective meaning beautiful- has four vowels to one consonant. Then again, they have words like SLECHTSTSCHRIJVENDE that contain 9 consonants in a row, so maybe my theory is garbage.
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