Amsterdam is an interesting place. The Netherlands was once all water and no land. They pumped out bucket loads of water to make it all dry. Apparently all of the Netherlands is under sea level and Amsterdam itself is built on top of a river. All of the quirky things about Amsterdam all have a perfectly legitimate reason behind it that always dates back centuries ago e.g. Cannabis was decriminilised because some guy back centuries ago didn’t think it was fair to jail all of the young kids because they were smoking cannabis.
Some other things to note about Amsterdam:
– There are more bicycles here than there are people. Seriously, there are 1.2 million bikes and only 700,000 people. Bikes have right of way and they are everywhere. They even have car parks but for bikes, I guess you could call them bike parks? Even dominos pizza is delivered on pushbikes.
– Every one knows about the red light district but have you heard of the blue light district? Well if you walk down the blue light district area the small difference is that all the pretty girls aren’t girls! Did some body say she-male?
– The red light district is actually heavily funded by the government. Apparently all of the girls work items are fully tax deductible e.g. implants, other types of plastic surgery, lube, toys etc… Apparently if any one takes a photo of one of the girls, you should expect to see some heavies come out and jump on their camera and then on top of them 🙂
– Amsterdam is nowhere near as picturesque as Paris, but I guess that’s to be expected. It’s just so varied and random with no consistency e.g. you’ll be walking through a block of buildings / homes and they will be all different styles and colours and everything.
– There are coffee shops and cafes. Coffee shops specialise in cannabis. Cafes specialise in coffee 🙂 Both types of shops have wide varieties of their respective products.
Yesterday we went on a bike tour. Not as good as Paris but still worth the money. The highlights were seeing and old style windmill and visiting a clog factory and cheese farm. Rach and I bought some cheese from there. It’s great. It’s made the old style way too.
Later that night we headed to the red light district. Nothing special really. I was expecting a lot more from what everyone described. It was really just woman in Windows with underwear on.
Today we went to the house that Anne Frank hid in. She was a jew hiding from the Germans. She wrote a diary of her encounters and that has been published in many different countries. If you’re interested check out the below link: