Woke up this morning to impressively sore muscles, courtesy of the extra 30 km haul into Lelysted forced upon us by inaccurate German cycling maps. Lelysted itself is like a SimCity rendition of something out of the super-planned quasi-Soviet dystopian world of Clockwork Orange. The city is laid out on a grid with the downtown smack-dab in the centre. Upon approaching the downtown from our campsite, we crossed pedestrian bridges between square city-block park sections over roads with roundabouts at each intersection. As we came closer, the parkland gave way to housing developments constructed with geometric precision according to some mid-century neon-Technicolor aesthetic, their previously brilliant primaries slowly greying under constant abuse from weather and urban pollution. The downtown itself was packed with Saturday market-goers; to compound this, a Scouting festival had taken over one of the public squares with cacophonous percussion. The whole thing was utterly unlike any other city we've passed through so far - at once refreshing and unsettling, although we had little time to explore it.
We then grabbed a train for Amsterdam, being in no shape to cycle there after yesterday's long and headwind-fraught journey. It seems that most European rail networks charge a flat fee for bicycles; as such, the bike tickets cost nearly as much as the passenger tickets! There's this 20 km-long stretch of pseudo-safari parkland just out of Lelysted - it's strangely barren, punctuated only by the occasional roaming animal herd or precariously wind-bent tree. (There's a reason they build so many wind farms here!) A short bit later, we disembarked into Amsterdam-Centraal and its throngs of drug-addled tourists. Our general philosophy during this trip has been to plan as little as possible, and so we arrived with no place to stay and little hope of finding a campground anywhere near the city centre; as such, we elected to search for a cheap hostel. The natural place to make such inquiries is the local tourist information centre, but this was backlogged with a queue of nearly 50. Instead, we dropped 1€ on a map listing hotels and hostels near the downtown core, using it as a basis for our search.
One hour and several unsuccessful attempts later, we found spare rooms in the Bulldog off one of the canals near the red-light district. (It was surprising to find that Amsterdam had so many canals, as the city is better known for its more notorious attributes!) They didn't allow checkins before 1500, however, so we left our gear in their locked storage room while we killed time over tea and Calvados in a nearby café. Bulldog owns a series of coffee shops, cafés, and bars throughout the city. The euphemistically-named "coffee shops" are cannabis-smoking lounges which additionally offer a variety of snacks (but no alcoholic beverages!), whereas the other two are what you would expect. Although certain drugs (such as marijuana, psilocybin, and their various derivatives) are legal, others are not; recent amendments to the drug law have also prohibited the use of marijuana in public areas, analogous to similar limitations on the smoking of tobacco. In addition, most permanent residents take an unfavourable view of Amsterdam's reputation; most CouchSurfing hosts in the area, for instance, request that travellers refrain from bringing drugs into their homes. For this reason, Amsterdam is very much two cities in one: one part for tourists, who predominantly come to take advantage of lax drug laws, and another for everyone else. It is also an interesting case study in decriminalization: as an early adopter, Amsterdam reaps both the benefits of greatly increased tourism and the challenges of reconciling the tourist-driven drug culture with the existing local culture.
Aside from its reputation as a mecca for drugs and sex, Amsterdam also boasts a world-class cycling path network with ridership rivalling that of Copenhagen. Bikes line every available railing along the canals; to deal with scarce parking space, some even hang their bikes out over the canal with longer cable locks! Even if the weather proves less than favourable tomorrow, we'll get a chance to enjoy those paths when we leave Monday morning.