I traveled to Utrecht, another city in the Netherlands, to have brunch with some friends. Amsterdam is near the top of the Netherlands and lies against a river called the IJ (pronounced like "eye"). Utrecht is about 30 miles away, in the center-eastern part of the Netherlands. To get to Utrecht, I biked fifteen minutes to the Amsterdam train station, and then took a thirty minute inter-city train to the Utrecht train station. Trains are very fast and popular in the Netherlands. My coworker even commutes from Utrecht to Amsterdam every day, because it is cheaper to live in Utrecht, and the trains are so easy to use!
After taking my 3800 mile plane journey from the U.S.A. to Amsterdam, I've taken a plane to Lisbon, in the country of Portugal, which is about 1,000 miles away to the west from Amsterdam. By train, I've traveled to Brussels in the country Belgium, which was about 100 miles away, and this journey took about two hours traveling on a train. I've also been to the city of Nijmegen (pronounced n-EYE-meh-chen) in the Netherlands, which is very far south and east of Amsterdam. Nijmegen is about 50 miles away from Amsterdam, and the train journey took an hour and a half. Nijmegen is so far south and east that you can bike over the border into Germany from the city center!
