Dachau, Edam, Amsterdam

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Another cool morning today. A sure sign we're back heading north! Today our journey was from St. Goar to Amsterdam.

Today's first stop was at Dachau, where we visited the deeply moving concentration camp. This concentration camp was set-up by Adolf Hitler in 1933 for political prisoners, and was used to base all later concentration camps on. It showed what sort of appalling conditions the prisoners had to endure, and is a part of German history which everyone would like to forget. It was quite an understandingly sombre place, where it makes you appreciate life, and left a mark on a lot of us who walked round.

We got to Edam in the afternoon, and stop off at a quaint little farmhouse, where we saw how Edam cheese is made, and also how wooden clogs are made. The guy carving out the clogs made it look so easy, and was very humourous. I remember someone saying in our group 'he can come on our tour!'.

After this, we then stopped off at 'Bike-A-Dijk', where we all got our granny bikes and cycled around the small town of Edam. It was quite a strange feeling being back on a bike. I hadn't ridden a bike since I was about 15! The bikes were embarrassingly old-fashioned, but as everyone were riding these, I didn't feel quite so bad. It was really weird, however, not having the usual brakes. On these bikes, to brake you have to reverse the pedals to slow down. It took a little while to get used to that I must say.

We went and saw a dyke, and saw a typical Dutch windmill, amongst other things. It was a lovely sunny day today. The best sort of day for bike riding. I think we all had a lot of fun on those.

From here, we arrived in Amsterdam. As it was Craig's last day today, it had come to the point when we had to say farewell to him. He had been such a great guy on our tour, and had got on with everyone so well. He had been really entertaining for the whole tour, and we were really unhappy that he hadn't been allowed to finish the tour with us. It was such a shame.

We then had to walk to our hostel. This was a niceplace, 3-share again, and I was with Stu and Tex again.

Tonight, after dinner, we were out in Amsterdam's red light district. We visited the Grasshopper 'coffee shop' where some of us tried their specialities, and then onto Casa Rosso, where we were treated to a live show. We had a funny surprise during one of the shows with Paul dressing up a gorilla!!! 'Nuff said about that though!

Then we went for a walk around the red light district, through the various alleys with their red light windows. I thought it would be an intimidating place to go to, but it wasn't. After this, we went for a couple of drinks in the 'Hole in the Wall' pub.

We were here for about an hour, before we got the tram back to our hostel. We then stayed in the bar until 1am.

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Photos

Edam
Where we found out how cheese and clogs were made.

Edam
On of our stops on a bike ride.