Dam Good City Center

Every city has a center. It's the part of the city that tourists visit first, it's the heart of the town, and it is the dwelling place of iconic architectural landmarks. In Florence, it's the Duomo; in Athens, it's the Acropolis; in New York City, it's Times Square; and in Amsterdam, it is a carnival.

As we stood in Dam Square marveling at the booths of stuffed toys and funnel cakes, I thought, No one actually lives here, right? Who could get work done? Well, we had mapped out quite the day of sight-seeing, but obviously we were going to take a break to enjoy the carnival. We opted for the giant swings. Hysterical, we were pulled upwards way above the city and began to rotate, the swings pulling us closer to the obelisk of Dam Square with centrifugal force. Surprisingly, this turned out to be a delightful way to see the city! Got a pretty great view from up there. The only problem was that it was damn cold [rim shot].

After our descent, we simply had to sample some Belgian-influenced-carnival food in the form of a huge cone of fries slathered with some sort of cheesy deliciousness. I was in French fry nirvana. Let's be honest, fries are yummy, but I never knew a French fry could taste like that. We munched, collected our dignity, and continued with our touring.

We returned to the carnival the next day.

How could we resist?! It was raining, so we opted for not repeating the swings but instead took a ferris wheel ride. Cozy and dry inside our gondola we got yet another excellent aerial tour of the city. The ferris wheel was perfectly placed next to the palace (probably the REAL attraction of the city center for normal people), which was advantageous since it was pretty tightly shut up for renovations at the time of our visit. The ferris wheel at least afforded us a view of it from the top, which was pretty cool.

Dam nice city.