Another city I have visited in the past couple years was Havana. This was quite an interesting city to me, because of the contrast between the tourist areas and where the general population lived. It really was beautiful though, as it was first settled by the Spanish, the architecture there was just awesome. The main area I visited was called Centro Havana, which is the main shopping district. There were lots of really cool markets there and it was an experience bartering with the merchants.

The city was very influenced by the baroque era, which is one reason why the city is so cool. The Havana Cathedral is an example of this and was a sweet building to  visit and walk around in. There were many modern buildings too, and though I didn’t go in it, one of them is called the Focsa. It has 400 apartments, a supermarket, garages, a restaurant and even a school all contained within. It is massive, and seems like a weird idea, but an intriguing one.

Here is a picture I took of Havana’s Capitol building.

Just thought I would share a bit of this city with you guys. If you ever want to go on a vacation and haven’t been, go to Cuba!

In my last post, I shared why I liked Amsterdam because of its culture, which involved the aspect of biking. That is also the topic I am doing my essay on and have found some cool reasons on why biking in Amsterdam has been so effective.

One of these reasons is the GWL Terrein. This residential area of Amsterdam is a car-free zone, which in turn creates a safe environment for children’s play and for people to just generally interact. There are no streets into the area, as they are not needed because of the no-car policy. They also have a very unique way of keeping traffic out, there are signs at various entrance points, but the unique part is that the development is raised from street  level so that cars do not have access to the inner area. (Other than a few access ramps for emergencies) People who live in this area also really seem to love it, as 62% of the people who live there have been there for over 8 years (2010 stats). This just shows that once you live there, apparently you don’t want to leave.

There are many other cool things about this neighborhood but I feel as if this post would be way to long. I hope this is as interesting to everyone else as it was to me. I suggest you all look up this area if you have time, as it is very intriguing.

A couple years ago I went and traveled around Europe for a month with my family. For the first three weeks we were stationed out of Holland so I got to see many of their cities. One of my favorite cities to visit was Amsterdam. It was just a really cool place, and not because of the red light district or its marijuana laws, but because of the way it looked, and the overall character of the city.

A  major difference from our cities that I noticed in Holland and especially Amsterdam was the amount of bicycles that were around. There were entire parking garages dedicated to bikes, which to me was crazy. Some random stats I came across while looking up Amsterdam is that there are over a million bikes in a city of 700,000 people. This is double the amount of cars and because of all the bikes there are over 15,000 km of bike lanes in Amsterdam. We had a rental car for traveling around, but you could immediately tell that if we were staying solely in the city and not traveling why this would be a bad idea. Many of the roads were very small and could barely fit two cars going in opposite directions, especially if there were cars parked on the side. I was very glad I was not the driver, as I could tell it would take more than a little time to get used to this. We ended up walking many places in the city because it was more of an inconvenience to move the car around.

This is just one of the reasons why I really liked Amsterdam. It was a completely different atmosphere, and not having the crazy amount of cars around that we do was nice as well. One day I want to go back, and instead of renting a car, rent a bike and experience traveling the city the way the majority of its citizens do.