Sam is a sophomore who usually needs a haircut. He gives a lot of tours on campus and is excited to actually get the chance to go on some this summer for a change. He also leads trips into the wilderness for the First-Year Outdoor Program and Outing Club and serves as manager for the alpine ski team. This love for the mountains is reflected in his destinations for this summer: Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands… wait. While he might not be straying too far from sea level, Sam’s still looking forward to the many high points of his trip—eating chocolate in Antwerp, eating chocolate in Bruges, eating chocolate in Brussels, and making friends with the deer that live in that one deer sanctuary north of Copenhagen.
Sam's Latest Posts
Getting a haircut in Amsterdam
The Dutch are famous for their hipness. People just care about their appearance more than we do across the pond. The average stylish outfit per capita in Amsterdam is through the roof and quite a bit more than you’d expect to find even in the most unbearably hip enclaves in the States (Portland, Seattle, Boulder—listen […]
Shredding Holland: my time catching mad waves with a crazy guy named Robert
I don’t really surf. I’ve “surfed” once, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with my friend Mikey who’s way better than me and basically just babysat me as I floundered in the water. That was two, maybe three, years ago. Since then I haven’t really touched a surfboard–but that doesn’t mean the sport doesn’t appeal to me. I […]
How to do the Rijksmuseum Right
The Rijksmuseum is the flagship art museum of the Netherlands and frequently counted among the greatest museums in the world, but all that fame and popularity comes at the cost of occasionally overwhelming crowds and long wait times at the door. Here are a few rules of thumb to follow if you’re looking to make […]
Amsterdam’s Local Art Scene
Given Amsterdam’s progressive, hip culture, their incredible array of public art institutions, and their taste for the finer things in life (good beer, bicycling, lounging around in parks, etc) it’s no surprise that there’s a lively up-and-coming local artist scene as well. As a tourist, it’s always hard to discern the real deal from kitschy, […]
Bar Whiplash
You can’t really encapsulate Amsterdam’s nightlife scene in any one vibe. There’s a wildly disparate variety of bars, clubs, and concert halls to discover, and on one night in July I set out to find just how broad the spectrum of options really is. I started off at Hotel Twentyseven, a boutique spot right on […]
Shredding Holland: my time catching mad waves with a crazy guy named Robert
I don’t really surf. I’ve “surfed” once, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with my friend Mikey who’s way better than me and basically just babysat me as I floundered in the water. That was two, maybe three, years ago. Since then I haven’t really touched a surfboard—but that doesn’t mean the sport doesn’t appeal to me. I […]
The Neuhaus: Unpacking Rotterdam’s Ambitious Would-Be-Successor to the Bauhaus
2019 has been a big year for the Bauhaus. A motley array of the world’s finest art and cultural institutions celebrated the 100 year anniversary of the founding of the seminal school, and printing houses churned out publications dedicated to the various workshops, artists, and movements that emerged over the course of the slightly-more-than-a-decade for […]
The Best Bar in Ghent
I went to ‘t Velootje late one night at the recommendation of the previous RW to cover Ghent–I was told something along the lines of, “yeah, you need to see ‘t Velootje. It’s nuts.” Now, “nuts” is a word that gets thrown around a lot when kids otherwise used to Boston’s bland nightlife come to […]
An Evening Splurge on the Mont des Arts
For an enterprising tourist in Brussels, there’s no classier way to spend an evening than on the Mont des Arts, the “hill of the arts” that sits above the city center to the east. It’s packed with some of the city’s best museums, concert venues, and restaurants. In other words, it’s a great way to […]
The Aarhus Watersports Scene
I went to Aarhus straight from Copenhagen, not quite knowing what to expect. Aarhus and Copenhagen are easy to compare: they’re the two largest cities in Denmark, they’re both situated on major bodies of water, and they both have canals running through their city centers that loosely—and largely unsuccessfully—emulate those famous waterways of Amsterdam to […]
The Wonders of Copenhagen’s City Hall
Copenhagen has a magnificent city hall, with its own stately town square in front and everything. It also happens to be an open, working building, meaning that you can head there during the week and poke around should the need arise to see the inner workings of Danish bureaucracy. Of course, City Hall also has […]
How to spend a magical day in Copenhagen that doesn’t involve spending time in Copenhagen
What if I told you one of the best ways to spend a day in Copenhagen is to leave the city altogether? Though the Copenhagen municipality is beautiful and has plenty of incredible experiences just waiting to be discovered within its bounds, there’s also at least a day’s worth of activities to do that lie […]
The Best Off-the-Beaten-Path Concert Venues in Boston
Boston has a great music scene, and pulls in big name artists year round to some of its legendary larger concert halls. Good things don’t have to come in large packages, however. Leave the theater district, put downtown in your rearview, and poke around the streets of Allston and Cambridge: you’ll find some phenomenal smaller […]