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Published: July 27th 2010
Breakfast at the hotel is basic but perfectly fine, I’m happy because they have Rusks and Tim is happy because he can make toast, smiles all round.
First up this morning we head to Madam Tussauds Wax Museum. In front of it there is a huge open square where buskers are already setting up (including the worst busker we’ve ever seen, wearing coloured tights and just standing in weird positions, maybe his morning coffee hasn’t kicked in yet…)and on the side of the square are horse and carts for hire.
We see people walking around, very tired, still wearing white from the party last night. Big night for some!
There is already a long queue waiting to get tickets, so glad I bought them on-line before we left home so we get to bypass the line!
First up through the door is Barrack Obama. He looks great, complete with laugh lines around his eyes, no photo shopping been done here! Someone takes our photo next to him and when another lady tries to take a photo she is told no photos allowed. Damn I thought, if you have to buy a photo with everyone you like, it
would end up outrageously expensive! Fortunately that isn’t the case, although Obama has been around for a while he is obviously still a big enough draw card that no freebies are allowed because enough people are prepared to pay. We weren’t. We learn this is the only time no photos can be taken.
Everyone piles in to a lift and the lift leaves every 5 minutes or so, there is a timer in there but it was already running down when we get in.
It starts off with a ‘History of Netherlands’ display through a series of rooms. You can’t go into the next room until it’s ‘time’. Even though it’s interesting, we hope that it’s not all going to be like this. Next we have a choice of rooms, the way to go if you have a bad heart or ‘the other way’. We go ‘the other way’. Doesn’t take long to regret it, it’s basically goblins and ghouls in near pitch darkness, jumping out at you, whispering in your ear, smelling you… Initially Tim and I are up front until the first one jumps at us, then we admit it, we were fraidie cats and we
pushed the couple behind us up front and said it’s your turn now! They ended up there the rest of the way, although the boyfriend hid behind his girl the entire time, so we all had a laugh about that!
After we survived that, the rest of the museum was how we expected it, lots of very real looking people standing around doing their thing. First up are members of the Dutch Royal family, even their dogs. It’s amazing how real they seem, the eyes seem to follow you and after the previous room we were in, we half expected them not to be made of wax and kept waiting for them to touch us!
They even had normal people mixed in with the celebrities, like a woman sitting on a couch smoking and reading a book, a girl sitting on a chair reading a magazine, a man waiting for his turn, so clever how it’s done.
There was Lady Diana, John F Kennedy, George Bush, Madonna, Elle McPherson, Bono, Elvis, Michael Jackson, Robbie Williams, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Einstein, Julia Roberts, there were just so many.
After the museum we went in search of
the Hard Rock Café for lunch, it wasn’t far to walk, over a few canals and we’re there. And nice easy direction signs as we got closer, even in English!
It’s in a great spot, which I guess all of the Hard Rock’s are, right next to a canal. You can sit out front next to the road, inside, or out the back on the canal. So we go the canal option. The verandah isn’t very wide so instead of sitting opposite each other, everyone sits side by side with their backs to the restaurant and looking over the canal. Apparently there have been more than a few who have toppled over the edge into the canal when they’ve been tippled!
The canal is buzzing with boats; little boats that have just enough room for 2 plus a bottle of champagne, large flat boats with big groups sitting on lounge chairs with many, many bottles of wine, boats that look like they have been around since perhaps before the First World War, sleek sporty boats with sleek sporty couples, lots of boats with dogs of all sizes. It’s easy to kill too much time people watching.
Food,
like the company, was as usual, really good.
After lunch strolled through some of the smaller streets window shopping, Europe is definitely not the place for affordable clothes shopping. Although at the moment there are heaps of sales on, if only I could work out the sizes here I could kill a wallet!
We walk past a ‘coffee’ shop, though I doubt there’s much coffee sold here judging by the ‘pot plants’ in the window!
We find ourselves a canal tour and climb aboard. There are so many different companies to pick from; the only thing that is really different about each one is the way the roofing is done on the boats. Wisdom with hindsight we probably would go with one that has a moveable roof. Ours had a glass roof over the entire boat, so where the joins are it makes it a bit tough to see things and to take photos when things are on the other side of the boat. The ones with a moveable roof push the roof back so the entire middle of the boat is out in the open.
The trip takes just over an hour and weaves it’s
way through all the canals, how these enormous boats maneuver around the tight bends and squeeze through under the bridges is beyond me. Some of the bridges only allow for a few inches either side, it just makes you hold your breath all the way through, then everyone cheers on the other side. And remember how busy I said the canals were with boats before, well it still is, so the driver has to squeeze around all of these as well. I’m plenty happy just to be a passenger on this boat!
We cruise along all the historical buildings, churches and then finally the big port. It’s such an old city and all the buildings and houses all look they are straight out of a story book (as everywhere we’ve seen in Europe has been), I understand now why so many tourist shops sell little individual buildings (between 2-5 floors high) that you buy lots of and then stand alongside, thereby making your own little Amsterdam!
On the way to dinner we stop for a Chinese massage. Great massage but no chance of falling asleep. My lady’s phone kept ringing, so she’d tuck the phone under her ear
and chat away while still massaging - multi-tasking I guess. Tim was in the room next door and I could hear the phone ringing in there as well, perhaps they were calling each other!
We have dinner at a kebab place (very nice, but not rolled up like we would do, but all open on a plate), hit the souvenier shops (patting all the resident cats along the way makes it take a little longer - sorry Tim!) then we hit the Red Light District.
Because it doesn’t get dark until after 10pm here it takes a while before everything starts, can’t have red lights in the daylight, just doesn’t work!
We are well aware that you aren’t meant to take photo’s of the girls, but you can’t hold a determined tourist back! So, standing a fair distance away I manage to get a shot or two in before she spots us and ducks around a corner. It’s funny that they don’t allow photos when the whole point of being in the windows is being on show.
Walking around it doesn’t have the sleazy, grimy image that we imagined it would. Perhaps because of the setting,
the old buildings, the canal... Even with more sex shops in one small street than you would find in the entire Kings Cross in Sydney, coupled with ‘theatres’ showing live sex shows and not holding back on their descriptions of what’s on offer! There are all types of people walking around, we saw a whole bus full of 60-70 year olds walking out of a sex shop all giggling their heads off, a family with their 8-10 year old kids (they also went to a very explicit ‘Sex Through the Ages Museum’, very educated kids now!), lots of couples (with the women holding very tight to their men!).
The girls in the windows were not all what I imagined them to be. While some could be Playboy Playmates with not much more than a strip of fabric (there’s an ambulance out there that is missing all their bandages) covering the ‘important’ bits, others were just average girls of all sizes and shapes wearing just your regular K-Mart bra and knickers.
As the fellas walk past, the girls knock on the windows and try to wave them over, all the fellas except for Tim! I tell him that they
won’t waste their efforts on someone firmly attached to the wife, it would be like me going to into a Versace store wearing my Thailand Versace top, the sales assistants won’t waste their time on someone who’s obviously not going to buy… But they also don’t even make eye contact with us, so my goal is to see how many waves, smiles or hellos I can get. Surely one of them has to be just a nice friendly person, for no reason but just to be friendly. Out of the whole area we walked I got three hellos.
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kylie
non-member comment
you make me laugh
Hilarious Sammy....only you would wave at hookers 'just to see if they are nice'. LOL