First day in Amsterdam

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Wow, what a day!! If today is indicative of our holiday for the next three weeks we are going to have an outstanding time!!

After a 12 hour flight from HK, we landed on time around 7.00am this morning. We made our way by train into Amsterdam Centraal Station which was very simple and quick and then found this amazing café called Le Pain Quotidien (The Daily Bread) which, apparently is part of a chain but, oh what fantastic food - all organic and delicious. We walked to the AirBnB and discovered another treat. The Silk Merchant's Palace is everything they said on the web plus more. We have a room with magnificent 3m high windows looking out onto a courtyard garden. The house is in Herengacht which is a street right on one of the canals, very centrally located. The hosts, Dicky (elegant Dutch lady) and John (Irish seaman who's lived in Amsterdam for the last 15 years) are lovely and have made us feel very welcome.

We visited a Saturday morning market which had the most amazing produce (cheeses galore (I'm sure my cholesterol will come back down after the trip!!), fruit and veggies, endless varieties of mushroom (I wondered whether some of them were 'magic mushrooms'), bread and pastries. We bought lunch and then found a lovely park to eat it.

We then headed back into Centraal where we caught the free ferry across the River Ai to the A'dam Toren lookout which provides panoramic views across the whole of Amsterdam and surrounds.

We completed the day time activities with a stroll through the Red Light district. If that is what it is like in daylight, I'm glad we didn't go at night!! What a strange manifestation of society.

The other thing that takes a lot of getting used to in Amsterdam is the legalized sale of cannabis - it is everywhere. We did chuckle when we saw cannabis chuppa chups, although we worried about how the kids of Amsterdam deal with things like this.

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Photos

A healthy breakfast
goats chees omelette and French toast with a mug latte