In April, I went to a conference (CHI - Computer Human Interaction) in Den Haag, the Netherlands. I stayed in the Scheveningen district, a few blocks from the beach and the hotel Kurhaus resort, built in 1885. The conference welcome gala was held in the Kurhaus, as well as a workshop I participated in on Natural Language Understanding. When I wasn't at the conference, I did some sightseeing, and went to Madurodam, an outdoor miniature city containing all kinds of things from Holland. I loved it. They also had a visiting exhibition from China, of fantastic ice sculptures.
After spending five days in Den Haag, I took the train to Amsterdam, where I met up with my friend Ryan. He'd booked us into a cute and tiny place called the Bicycle Hotel. The steps were amazingly steep and narrow. We spent a couple of days wandering the streets, going to little cafes, visiting the Van Gogh museum, the Anne Frank House, and taking a night tour of the canals.
We took a day trip to Rotterdam, which is the largest port in the world. It turned out to be a very modern city. We took a long walking tour and saw a lot of interesting architecture.
On the way back to Amsterdam, we stopped in a little town called Harlem, which had quaint winding streets and a nice atmosphere.
One day, we rented bicycles from our hotel ($3/day) and took a long trip. We took the ferry to the north side of Amsterdam, and spent hours riding along the peaceful canals. We borrowed a book from the hotel and tried to follow it, but the directions were pretty vague. We rode against the wind for the first half and it was pretty rough going. We took a little ferry ride across the canal, on a one-car-sized ferry with one man operating it. We passed through tiny picturesque towns. Unfortunately, we didn't see many windmills. I think it was my favorite part of the trip.
Here's a slideshowand a photo album (thumbnails).