Amsterdam!

So here's a tonne of photos from Amsterdam. The weekend mainly consisted of a lot of walking around, catching up with my friend Ang, food, drink, enjoying the abundance of sunshine, and Luke using the public urinals... over and over and over again. Apparently the novelty doesn't wear off.
This first photo if of the old city gate. Initially when the city was built and planned it had a big wall around it (as lots of places did, to stop nasty invaders getting in), and there's bits and pieces of it scattered around. Its now being used as a cafe/restaurant in the Neumarkt square.


When we first arrived and had met up with Ang, we headed to our hostel to drop off our stuff, and it was right near the Neumarkt square, and there was a market there... mainly food and flowers. The photo below is of a stall filled with mushrooms.


Here's the public urinals Luke was obsessed with.
Once we'd had some lunch what we'd planned to do is head straight over to Anne Frank's house, because that's one of the things we definitely wanted to see while we were there. When we got there, the line to get in was soooo long, it went all the way down the street, around the corner, and half way down the next block. We didnt want to waste our time, so instead we bought a ticket that takes you on a city tour on the canal boats - like the hop-on-hop-off buses that you get in every main city anywhere. It was a lot slower than a bus, but there were tables so we bought ourselves some lunch and settled in for a trip round the city, some food, and lots of photos. The houses are really interesting - all very thin and very tall. Apparently, when the city was being built, they would only sell plots of a width of 5.5 m, I think so that more people could have water views. Even if it was toilet water - all the houseboats (and there's a good few thousand) have toilets that empty straight into the canals. The smallest house in Amsterdam has a width of only 2.2m. Crazy.





Here's me and Ang on the canal boat.






The little streets in Amsterdam are just crammed with windows, and most windows are crammed with detail. This obviously very old candlabra I liked. The taxidermy below is a bit freaky - though not as freaky as the Frankenstein creations we saw in Munich.

This is a bit gross (sorry mum) but you must admit, for Amsterdam, my photos are very censored. We stopped to get some chips, and only afterwards did we notice the mascot. Suddenly cheese sauce wasnt so appealing.
This is the national monument. I know nothing about it, because there were no signs in English.
By about 6pm we were stuffed, so we sat for a while in a streetside restaurant, drank beer, and watched people and the sun both start to become scarcer. It was nice just chatting, and when it became cold enough, we moved inside and ordered some food.


This I've put in to follow on from one of the signs in Munich. Although he does his shopping in Germany, apparently Amsterdam is where Luke belongs.

I wanted to get a photo of clogs, tulips, and a windmill while we were there.... this photo took about an hours worth of walking to get. At least it was a nice day.
We saw this family bike in one of the squares and thought it was worth a photo.
Overall, Amsterdam was fun, but not a place I feel the need to go back to. Nice for a weekend away though.