Amsterdam’s city symbol is three side-ways crossed, which look like the letter “X”. I was amusing myself with laughing about Amsterdam being “XXX,” or triple-X. Then it occurred to me that this might actually be where the term “triple-X” comes from – that Amsterdam has long been known for, shall we say, looser morals, and that this may have worked its way into English. This theory pleases me so much that I have not bothered to do the seventeen seconds of web research I would need to verify it. I like my idea even if it is not true.

Today was “my” day, and I wanted to take a bit of a touristic risk. We all like seeing cities, and we all like games, so I thought we were a perfect match for City Challenge – Amsterdam, an iPad-based game in which you run around the city solving puzzles and racking up points in an attempt to get the highest score for the month. It is not a timed game (for the most part), so it lets you have time for picture stops and lunch and such. It has a four-hour option of the game that takes you through most of the old center of the city, so if we finished it, we would have a good overview of the city (which is not the same thing as being able to navigate a city based on circular canals).

So we picked up our iPad around 11:00 after a pleasant thirty-minute walk from our house to the main shopping area near the train station, on the northern end of the city center. We started the mission just south of the station, which meant we would end the day back at the station.

The iPad games broke into a few categories. There were many stops where we had to answer multiple choice questions about Amsterdam; generally, we were taking wild guesses at these (we did not allow ourselves to use an iPhone for the answers). There were several stops where you had to look at a picture of the famous building in front of you and spot the differences between the real building and the edited picture. And then there were multiple major challenges, which were the most involved, but worth the most points.

These were generally fun. We had one for which we had to help friends find their lost friend before their flight left, based on the photos he had posted online. We had to run through the shopping district collecting letters from signs to spell a word out (the only game we failed at because the instructions were not clear to us how the counting of the signs was to be done). My favorite game had us solving which one of the men in the statue version of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch had killed the captain; we had to run around the area and collect four hints from virtual eyewitnesses while being chased by virtual henchmen. We had to match photos of parts of houses along three blocks to help the police find drug houses. We had to collect clues on how to defuse a bomb near the museums (I had to keep telling Dubbs not to say “bomb” so much around crowds and police). We had to help two lovers find each other in the Vondelpark. We had to help reboot the computer system at the train station based on timetables for trains. It was a blast.

And we actually learned some things about the city. We did not know that fifteen thousand bikes are dredged from the canals each year. We missed that the main shopping street was also the most expensive, with rents of three thousand euros per square meter.  (We thought it was a different shopping area with Armani and such that we had seen on Sunday). There are a little over a hundred kilometers (sixty miles) of canals in the city. The “Old Church” is the oldest building in the city, and the “New Church” burned down three times.

We saw most of the city, skipping the northwestern and the southeastern areas. While I had no desire to see the famous Red Light District, I knew there was a chance the game might take us into it, but I figured the “working girls” would not be working at 11:00 am on a Monday. I was wrong. I was looking at my iPad map when I caught, out of the corner of my eye, a curvaceous mannequin displaying lingerie. As I turned to make a snide comment to Meredith about her needing new clothing, the mannequin suddenly moved. I became very interested in my iPad, and our two-block tour of the District was quickly over.

The rest of the areas were quite lovely – the shopping district, in all of its holiday decor; lots of canals and lovely houses; the museum campuses; and the pleasant Vondelpark, where two nice ladies offered to help us when we were looking confusedly at the iPad. We explained we were playing a game and thanked them. I love the people here – they are incredibly nice.

We finished the “four hour” game in about six-and-a-half hours. We racked up over 45,000 points, but we will not get our official score and ranking via e-mail for about a day. The rankings hold the best scores for the last thirty days, and it looks as if we will fall into second place. Drat that letter-gathering game!

We had supper pretty much to ourselves in a restaurant next to the gaming place. It was great – two funny men running the restaurant, good food, and eighties pop music playing on the radio. We grabbed some dessert nearby and walked home. And walked. And walked. We ended up finding some new and pretty spots, but had to keep consulting the map and iPhone to get home.

So, between the game and the scenic stroll home, we set a new (for us) vacation walking record – 16 miles, or 31,000 steps. None of us was sad to get home, even if it was only 7:30. I think we will all sleep well tonight.