Netherlands

I visited Amsterdam during my study abroad year in 2009, on a long weekend away from Spain. The city is built for walking and bikes, and it took me about an hour to learn that the bike lanes are not for walking. The canals, the narrow tilted houses and the bridges every few hundred meters make the whole place feel like a film set.

I ate stroopwafels and fries with mayonnaise from paper cones, went to the Van Gogh Museum and the Anne Frank House, which is small and quiet and very hard to forget, and spent evenings in brown cafés that felt like living rooms. It was a short trip, and I was young, but it was one of the first places that made me think a city can just be relaxed and still work perfectly. I'd like to go back and see it as an adult.