The Dam

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Well this trip was a long time coming. Every traveller, stag do, lads weekend, uni student getaway has Amsterdam on their list of places to go & so it was my turn to visit this mysterious city. What was so much more fun was I had a friend from Australia come over for a bit of a surprise visit & ended up coming to Dam with us last minute which was brilliant.

So Sara, Julian & I chilled out & unpacked at the hotel then it was off to dinner in Leidseplein. We found an amazing steak & rib place with epic portions of ribs. I felt like I was going to explode but it was totally worth the deliciousness along with some tasty local brew. Then it was off to this fancy pants cocktail bar where you pay a €10 min for a drink but oh how delightful they were. What better way to kick off a holiday than to be classy & drink up expensive drinks. We settled in there for the night & made friends with our bar peeps. They loved us because we became one of those "Oh just surprise me" customers but boy did they deliver the goods. Never have I had such amazing drinks. YOu know its especially good when you can't even taste the alcohol......or is that my taste buds being numbed? Maybe a bit of both I feel.

So the following day we weren't as worse for ware as we thought which is a pleasant surprise. We wandered the streets, taking in the beauty that Amsterdam has for all who visit. It was quite lovely but then in the afternoon we had a mini snow storm. It was crazy!! Admittedly the weather was cold but it felt too cold to snow so it was quite a surprise but a complete joy for Julian who had never seen snow fall before & boy was it snowing. So we had some fun frolicking along in the snow for a while. We did some more drinking, a bit of dancing in a really dodgy club full of teeny boppers and singing in the streets....all in all some good times.

A trip to Dam is not complete without a visit to the good ol red light district. We did go during the day so it wasn't as seedy as it would usually be at night but it is quite a different place. You see things you can only imagine, but now they are burnt in my brain for all time 😉 We also visited the sex museum. Its quite a funny place really, extremely graphic & you see some weird & wonderful things (sorry no photos, didn't think it would be appropriate for a public site) but then you get to the S & M section. So after a hour or so of giggling at the funny & crazy stuff you walk through this room that has pictures of things you wouldn't even dream of doing. It was quite disgusting & sadly ruined the funny-ness of the rest of the place. Everyone goes in laughing & comes out shaking their heads saying "too far.....oh tooo far"

We also got to visit the Anne Frank Huis which had no line up when we rocked up which was a result! We actually walked right past it because we were looking for a line up. It was quite surreal being in the place they were but Otto (the father) insisted that it remain empty after the war so its just a lot of empty rooms but still quite a moving experience. Sara & I also figured it would be nice to get photo at the front door of the actual house. So we strike a pose, take a snap & then had this Dutch guy ask what we were doing. We put on our best innocent voices & said "We just wanted a picture of Anne's house" - we were thinking he was going to tell us off for taking the photo. He then burst out laughing & said "Silly girls, its not that house at all....its the one next to it with the sign that says 'Anne Frank Huis' " We all had quite a laugh at our stupidity but he was very kind & took a photo for us laughed us on our way.

I also visited the Van Gogh Museum which was actually pretty incredible. Apart from the hoards of stupid annoying school children who were the bane of my existence & inhibited a lot of my pondering / joy of looking at some works of art. We also hit up the Heineken Museum / Brewery which in all honesty i don't remember much because of what I ate at lunch (2 words, no 3 words....AMAZING SPACE CAKE). But there was beer & horses & i got my very own brew of beer with my name on the label which was excellent.

Funny story, when we were leaving the Heineken place to go back to the hotel I ran back inside to the cloak room begging the lady to find my legs. I thought I left them at the brewery because i honestly couldn't feel my legs despite the fact that I was walking on them perfectly fine. It was a hard trip home but when we got back this is when the giggling began. I must have giggled for a good 2 or 3 hours. Poor Sara having to put up with it because she did not partake. But I unleashed a whole string of different kinds of giggles which was funny in itself. Sara flushed my legs down the toilet (or so I thought), my eyebrow was crying for reasons unknown to me at the time & I was quite distressed when Sara was apparently dying & I couldn't get to the phone to ring emergency services. All in all such a fun time.

So that sums up our few days in Dam. It is such an incredible place which really surprised me because you often only hear the sex & drug stories. But the city is incredibly beautiful, the people are so friendly & it is just all in all a wonderful place. If i was talented enough to learn Dutch I would move there in a heartbeat

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