Operation Amsterdam: Find coffee shop. Find pannenkoeken.

I made it to Europe's most 17th-century city, home to around 750,000 progressive Dutch bike-riders, Amsterdam.

Cue Operation Amsterdam.

That means I need to check out, hit up, eat, stroll down, inhale and cruise through the Van Gogh Museum, a wooden clog maker, pannenkoeken (the famous Dutch pancakes), Leidseplein, the sweet aromas of the De Pijp District and a few of the many, many canals. Not necessarily in that order.

First I checked out the Van Gogh Museum. If you like Impressionism, you'll love this place. And if you like someone with a good story, you'll love Van Gogh to death (well, you have to, he killed himself after 37 troubled and artistically brilliant years). Even if you don't know much about Van Gogh, I guarantee you'll recognize a few pieces: Sunflowers, The Bedroom and a self-portrait or two.

Then I hit up the De Pijp District, conveniently located right behind the Heineken brewery, where I had the burden of deciding between all the Indonesian, Irish, Chinese and Dutch cafes (plus countless others), and grabbed a bite to eat and a Dutch beer to wash down that bite to eat.

I also managed to squeeze in the Verzetsmuseum (Dutch Resistance Museum) for an intriguing history lesson on how the Dutch resisted Nazi occupiers during World War II.

Sure I wouldn't need the lesson if I hadn't slept through AP European History my senior year of high school, but walking through the exhibits and reading the heartbreaking stories of people who lived on the very street I was standing on in the middle of Amsterdam ... well, that's just something I never could've grasped from the third row in the windowless-classroom next to the cafeteria in the middle of Arkansas.

Operation Amsterdam continues tomorrow. Those pannenkoeken won't eat themselves!