Amsterdam

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(Posted October 20th by Kim)

Amsterdam is a very peaceful canal city- surprising with its “bad” reputation. My overall impression is that as long as you avoid the red light districts and coffee shops that it’s a pretty cool place. I found a Christian hostel in one our books that we stayed at to avoid some of the craziness we might have come across at other hostels.

We spent the morning taking a canal cruise to get a good feel of the city from the water. The architecture is pretty amazing there, just ask Wilson! I think someone told me that Amsterdam actually has more canals than Venice, but I could be wrong about that. Amsterdam is newer than Venice and it shows in the feel of the city (new is 17th century, still much older than most cities around here!) One interesting thing is that there's alot of people that actually live on houseboats anchored in the canal in Amsterdam. That's one way to increase your living space!

We took off after lunch to den Hague to see Madurodam, so we didn’t spent a lot of time in Amsterdam itself. This was also the last night we had in a hostel before we headed back and the only place where we slept in separate guys/girls dorm rooms. They didn’t have any smaller quads at this place. The beds and bathrooms were pretty nice, but just as Tanya and I were trying to go to sleep several girls came in that had a bad case of the giggles. I’m glad we stayed one night in a dorm just to get the experience, and I really appreciated the double and quad rooms that we had stayed in during the rest of the trip much more after that!

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Photos

Canal view
Here's a "typical" Amsterdam canal street with boats tied up right in front of the houses and businesses.

The "cool" train travelers
Joe had fun with the sepia option on our camera! Now it almost looks like they were riding a train back in the 1800's, except that their clothes don't match and the train looks too new....

Amsterdam's smallest house
This is the smallest house in Amsterdam, number 7. I think it's only 2 stories high and very narrow, as you can tell from the picture.

Bicycles
I don't know that I've ever seen this many bicycles in one place before. This was close to the train station, so maybe that has something to do with it. There's also another canal boat in the picture.

Funny canal boat
The little boats you can pay to ride on the canals are very short and long so that they can fit under the short bridges. You can stand up in them but there's not much above your head. They're also covered since it rains alot in Amsterdam.

A floating train station
I can't believe that such a huge train station is basically just floating on water!

Holland windmill
Besides the miniature one at Madurodam, this view from the train was the closest I came to one of the "famous" windmills.

Joe enjoying the train ride
Traveling first class is very nice on trains!

Holland countryside
We got to see alot of nice countryside on the train ride from Amsterdam to Den Hague, where we visited Madurodam.