Amsterdam trip report

Well our holiday season travel itinerary is finally completed, and we're kind of glad! It's great to be able to travel so easily throughout Europe and we're making the most of the opportunity to see as much as possible, but it does get tiring, and I must say we're happy to spend the rest of January right here at home in Brussels!

We had a nice time in Amsterdam - it's a very cozy, attractive city with canals, gabled buildings and people everywhere riding bicycles. Even in the rainy weather we had for the first half of our visit, there were still a number of hard-core residents riding around on their bikes, hoods pulled tight and eyes half-closed against the raindrops...impressive!

As far as sights, we visited the Anne Frank museum, which was very well done and quite moving. How a young, vibrant teenager like herself (plus seven others) managed to cope with being cooped up in such a small place for more than two years is beyond me. The fact that they were only months away from surviving the war in hiding, and when she died she was only about a month away from liberation, was just so sad. Anyway, it was a place I'd wanted to visit for a long time, so despite it being a bit sobering I was glad we made it there.

We also took the obligatory canal cruise which was nice, though I found the one in Ghent to be both prettier and more personalized (meaning a smaller boat and the guide speaking directly to you, where here it was a recording and the captain hardly spoke to us at all). Most of the canals in Amsterdam also have cars parked along the edge, and some had sunken boats in them, so I just found them to be a bit less "photogenic" than the canals in Ghent, where pedestrian walkways or the edges of buildings line the canals. The water was clean though, and the canal cruise is still a great way to see the city from a different vantage point. As I mentioned a while back, we haven't done the canal cruise in Bruges yet, but we'll have to get back there and take one this Spring and see what we think of that.

Finally, the infamous Red Light district. Even if sex, drugs and booze aren't your thing, it's a sight to behold. It's seedy, raunchy, and a "sinner's paradise", but you have to see it for yourself...oh, and the people-watching is serious entertainment in and of itself! I've heard that Brussels, Antwerp and other cities have their own smaller districts, but this is the grandaddy of them all, and if you're in Amsterdam, you've got to at least wander the streets for an hour or two and see what all the fuss is about!

One last comment on Amsterdam: we were impressed by the variety of cuisine available there, particularly in the dining district known as Liedseplein, which was conveniently right around the corner from our hotel. On just one block of this street you can find restaurants featuring the cuisine of places as diverse as Spain, Uruguay, Indonesia, Japan and India. The choices were dizzying, but we were in the mood for tapas, so we ended up at a the Spanish restaurant (it was good by the way, and unlike some tapas places, a lot of food for the money). We also had a really tasty "pancake" breakfast, which I would definitely recommend! I used quotes when I said pancakes because the Dutch version is different; thinner, less "cakey" and with a seriously wide variety of available toppings! One thing is for sure, we definitely had no problem eating and drinking well in this city!

Picture #1: Carl in front of the Royal Palace in Dam Square (pronounced "dahm")

Pictures #2-3: Shots taken from the canal cruise; note the substantial "lean" of a few of the buildings in #3; that's a result of settling of the very soft ground the city is built upon

Picture #4: Canal shot taken from a bridge

Picture #5: the Prinsengracht canal - our hotel was along the right side of the picture, about 2/3 of the way down