I spent my wild 60th birthday adventure and photo safari in Amsterdam, Budapest, and Prague with my travel buddy, Chester Simpson.

Amsterdam

In Amsterdam, I stayed at the Pulitzer Hotel—and loved it. It’s right in the center of all the action, with great shopping along the canal. The Pulitzer is made up of 25 interconnected 17th- and 18th-century canal houses, which sounds charming, but at first they put me in a creepy, haunted-feeling room overlooking a dark corridor. Luckily, they quickly moved me to a bright room with a view of the garden and inner courtyard. Much better. Plus, they stocked the room with Stroopwafels (those addictive caramel cookies), which sealed the deal. The first thing you notice in Amsterdam is that life revolves around the canals—boats, cafés, and bicycles everywhere. I was sure I’d become bike roadkill on a daily basis. At night we rambled through the Red Light District, centered around the Oude Kerk. Prostitution here dates back to the city’s 13th-century port days, and by 1478 it was so widespread from all the sailors flooding in that it had to be contained. Today, the window prostitutes and neon clubs are part of the scene. Anne Frank and Amsterdam are forever linked. She dreamed of Hollywood, of glamour, and she knew in her heart she’d be published one day. My favorite souvenirs were the little KLM Royal Dutch Airline Delftware houses—miniatures originally filled with Dutch gin, iconic symbols of the Netherlands.

Budapest

A hop, skip, and a jump later, we arrived in Budapest—often called the Paris of Eastern Europe. Where you stay tends to be where you play, and we stayed in the Jewish Quarter, right across from Szimpla Kert, the hottest ruin bar in town. The neighborhood had long been abandoned, so hip, eclectic bars have sprung up inside crumbling buildings, decorated with vintage furniture and quirky odds and ends. As a Jew, there’s a certain pilgrimage you feel called to make in Eastern Europe, so I went temple-hopping. I bought hamsa hand charms and blessed them inside the spectacular Dohány Street Synagogue. Budapest is also one of the great spa cities, famous for its natural hot springs, so we hopped a train to soak at the Széchenyi Baths—giant thermal pools surrounded by Neo-Baroque architecture. Floating bandages, funky foam, and plenty of big bellies spilling over Speedos made the experience a little less glamorous than I had pictured, but memorable nonetheless.

Fun fact I didn’t know: Buda and Pest are actually two different cities, divided by the river. Pest is flat, Buda is hilly. “Buda” means water, “Pest” means factories. Much was bombed during WWII, but much has been rebuilt.

Prague

From there we took the train through Slovakia into the Czech Republic. Prague, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has been around for 1,100 years. We stayed in the Castle District in a 13th-century house. From the start, Prague felt enchanting and magical—though packed with tourists. I asked our tour guide why Hitler didn’t bomb Prague in WWII. She explained he planned to make this city his base and believed in its magic. The Nazi top brass apparently had a fascination with metaphysics and the occult, so the sacred places were spared. She sent me to Golden Lane, a row of artisan cottages that really do feel mystical. At house number 14 lived Madame de Thebes, a fortune teller who predicted the fall of the Third Reich. She was arrested by the Gestapo and tortured to death. I went temple-hopping again. At the back of the Old-New Synagogue, one of Prague’s oldest Gothic buildings, I made three videos. But when I reviewed them, only three still shots appeared, each with rays of divine light—no video. At the Old Jewish Cemetery, with its twelve layers of over 12,000 gravestones, I felt the weight of history. For over 300 years this was the only burial ground for Jews, and it remains its medieval 1478 size, because Jewish graves cannot be moved.