Amsterdam Land

Amsterdam is like two completely different cities, one is full of "coffee shops" and red light windows and "erotic" stores and the other is beautiful old buildings, green country sides, cheese and clog shops... and people juggling chainsaws.
The second city is where we spent pretty much all of our time.
Our first night we went on a canal cruise to get a bit of a look at the town from the water. Oh actually before we did that we went for a walk and saw this man...
Which seemed strange, but then he did this...
Yep, juggling a tennis ball (normal enough), a machete and a CHAINSAW! Pretty impressive introduction to Amsterdam we thought.
Anyway we went on a canal cruise, here is what our boat looked like
On the cruise we got to see and learn a lot about Amsterdam, we learnt that the buildings all have hooks on the tops of them because the stair cases are very narrow. when people move house they have to attach a rope to this hook, tie up their couch or piano and then hoist it through the window.

Here is me and Ewen on the boat

We saw the oldest house boat in Amsterdam, originally house boats came about in Amsterdam because the hippies couldn't afford anywhere else to live, but once the richies saw how nice it was to live on the canals they took over all the house boats and it is now very expensive to live in one. particularly because the government has stopped giving permits to have more built so when you sell your house boat you can pretty much ask any price you want and get it. They all have running water and electricity and you could see in some as we sailed past, they looked like normal houses, if i was rich I'd live in one :-)

This is the oldest house boat in Amsterdam and is now a museum

We sailed past Ann Franks house, it is the one in the middle
And the red light district, luckily for us these curtains are closed

There are 800,000 people living in Amsterdam and between 1.5 and 3 million bikes. Every year 80,000 bikes get stolen from Amsterdam alone. That is 219 bikes stolen every single day of the year. this doesn't include the thousands that get thrown into canals each year. this bike above is hanging on for dear life.
Bikers in Amsterdam are a tad aggressive, if you accidentally step onto a bike path within seconds 5 bells are ringing at you and if you don't get off quick smart you will get flattened by a bike. They don't care if they hit you they just keep on going. With this in mind we had booked a bike tour of the country side rather than the city center for the following day.
We were in a 6 bed dorm room but two of the beds were doubles so 8 people. our bed was the top one... the messy one of course. We stayed at The Flying Pig Uptown and it was pretty good, only thing was they had no where to brush your teeth, your choices were in the shower or in the toilet (which was very cramped and pretty stinky) apart from that the hostel was good. and we had good room mates up until the last night when three Spanish boys checked into our room and tried to smoke their weed in the room until Ewen stopped them. Oh that's the other thing the entire hostel (except our hostel luckily) smelt like weed, or like wet carpet i thought. not very pleasant!
Anyway the our first full day in Amsterdam we went on a tour with Mikes Bikes, our tour guide was called Petra and she was a bit of a character; big long dreadlocks, gold sparkly wooden clogs and the most incredible bike. it had a huge orange flower sticking up at the back so you could always tell who to follow and lots of toys and flowers stuck to the front. it also had a bubble container stuck to the side so every now and then she would blow bubbles for everyone to ride through. Petra had a great way of teaching everyone about the history of Amsterdam making it funny and interesting but also informative. We rode through parts of the city but mainly on bike paths and through parks. we rode through Vondel park and went to a clog and cheese factory. We saw a baby deer and windmills and a house boat village.
The cheese at the cheese farm, we brought a wheel of cheese just like these ones, although maybe smaller. i think it was the same size as the ones on the second shelf from the top, we used it for picnics for two days. It was delicious with bread (fresh from the bakery), ham and tomato.

The baby deer and his mummy

The house boat village

At a windmill in Amsterdam

After the tour we took our cheese and got some bread from the bakery and had a picnic at Vondel Park by the lake.

Ewen hand fed some ducks!

Our cheese, i think it was seeded mustard flavour, the colourful material you can see is the pashmina i got in Turkey which i coming in handy for lots of things!

Me & Ewen at our picnic

After this we walked over to the other side of Amsterdam, this is the slightly more seedy side housing the Red Light District. On the way we went to a Sex Museum which was pretty disturbing. Here is Ewen attacking the flasher
We had a drink in a pub to get ourselves ready for all the disgusting things we expected to see, it turned out our three drinks (a beer, a sprite and a orange juice & vodka) cost us the equivalent of what we would normally spend on dinner so that was a bit of a shock. In this pub two local men started talking to us, they were very interested in our trip and asked lots of questions, they were also very interested in Australia, in particular kangaroos which was funny. i told them about the highway out to my parents place where people hit kangaroos with their cars every day, these guys couldn't believe it. They offerhated us a tour around the streets and Ewen agreed. Well i thaught it was a tour around the streets at first, it turned out to be a tour in a concert hall across the street that they both worked in. this would have been fine except that the concert hall was closed for the night. they lead us inside and locked the door behind us and this is when i started to freak out! they procedded to show us the different rooms of the concert hall telling us all abotu its history, i didnt hear any of this i was looking for exits and weapons thinking they were going to murder us. they wanted to take us to the top of the building so look at the view but i told them we had to go. they let us outside and that was that. doesnt sound like much but i was so scared the whole time i was thinking how the hell did i get myself in this situation, later Ewen told me even he had been taking note of exits and had noticed a power drill on the ground he would use if he needed to so if Ewen was scared i figure i was allowed to be scared too!

The building the guys showed us through
The back of the Red Light District, it looks so innocent doesn't it!
This is the oldest church in Amsterdam, it is in the Red Light District which seems strange to me, i suppose things are done a little differently in Amsterdam.

So after a lot of messing around we finally had a walk around the red light district, it wasn't as bad as i thought it would be, a lot of girls in bikinis or underwear standing in windows looking bored or talking on their mobile phones. we saw one of the prostitutes yelling at a man for looking at her for too long which was interesting. We also went down the transvestites alley by accident, this was a mistake because Ewen started talking very loudly about trannies just as one of them stuck his/her face out of the door right in front of us.
We got some dinner and walked back to the hostel, a very long walk back because we got very very lost even though we had a map. that could only happen to us!

Entertaining ourselves on the long walk home

The next day we got up early and went to the I Amsterdam sign to get some photos, turns out it was a good idea to go early because about half an hour after we got there people were climbing on every single letter!

We spent the morning at the Rijksmuseum which was interesting. We got to see the Nightwatch painting which Ewen had been looking forward to. Sadly 80% of the museum is closed at the moment for renovations, it has been closed for a years and isn't expected to re open for another few years.

Here is the front of the museum

After this we had another picnic lunch in the park and then Ewen went back to the hostel to work on his blogs while i went in search of a beauty salon who would remove excess hair from my Bert eyebrows. I succeeded in finding somewhere and after paying a small fortune i feel a lot less like a dirty traveler now. It's incredible how hard it is to do simple things like getting your eyebrows waxed while on trips like this. I'm not sure how the high maintenance girls handle it.
We didn't do much else, sent home some postcards and had a last walk around before getting some dinner and packing up our stuff ready to leave for Berlin the next morning.

Playing with some of the local wildlife

Oh also, on our last night i finally got to taste some Dutch pancakes. we got apple and cinnamon with cream and it was delicious! luckily we ordered one to share because it turned out to be the size of a dinner plate!!
Anyway I'll try to get my Berlin post up tomorrow. I've been hassling Ewen to get his blogs up so they should be on their way soon He He
Missing everyone! Don't forget to email/comment so i know what is happening back home!!!