Holland

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We arrived in Holland at the start of August to stay a week with Breezy aka Andrew who lives in the Hague and we met in the middle east . It was great just to relax and have the comforts of home and to be able to cook every night for us all and drink of course. Breezy is a great guy and i look forward to catching up with him in Perth when i get back and he moves back.

To be honest we didn’t do much we took in a soccer game Netherlands premier division which was good fun and went to a street parade with dance music 40 trucks spaced apart with a couple of djs i would normally play to see playing and we went to Bruges in Belguim for the day mainly because i had heard so much about the city but also for the Belguim beer and chocolate.

Bruges was a beautiful city with lots of canals we made the most of the day trip doing a boat cruise and a brewery tour and soaking up the city which has a medieval feel and style to it with chocolatiers on every second corner and bars on every other corner. The belgums are famous for both but take their beer very seriously with each beer having its own style of glass apparently for the flavour but i think its just marketing. Anyway it was a great day and worth the 3 hr trip.


So we left breezy and headed to Amsterdam city of graft and corruption well maybe not but it sounds close enough. My expectations before going were well sex and smoking weed and yes thats whats there but there but ts more to the place than that. When booking out accommodation i wasn’t sure where we would be located apart from being central what i didn’t know was that it was right in the middle of the red light district sex shows one side prostitutes the other highly entertaining.

We had 4 days to look around i think we hit the Van Gogh museum first personally i love the impressionists and was amazed to know that he was self taught only painted for 8 or 9 years and produced a massive 900 works if you do the maths that s a painting every 3 days or so or about 100 per year. I love how he evolved so quickly from very dark and boring works before the stuff you see today which he is well known for the scream and sunflowers although Monets are better.

Amsterdam has more canals than people not really looks that way though lol. It does have an enormous amount of bicycles apparently there is a bike stolen every 2 minutes which explains why all the bikes look similar and that when they dredge the canals they pull out some 25,000 bikes as the canals are 5 m deep. It would be remiss of me not to mention the waft of Weed as you walk around everywhere.

The following day we took a bike tour around the city as thats what you do. We covered lots of the city negotiating mad tourists and other bikes. Later on we met some aussies surprise surprise and went to a coffee shop for a splif or two i don’t really smoke these days but when in Rome you know what they say so that was great fun and lots of laughs. The city has these chip stalls which they are famous for just chips noting else they are great crispy and you have a choice of lots of sauces-i think there could be a market for that at home.

Later on we did a red light district tour which wasn’t that great but informative apparently the girls rent the windows for 8 hrs at a cost of 150 euros some of them are not bad others well there must be a market out there for there services thats all i can say. In the evening at the end of the tour we did stopped at a hostel/bar with 2 for 1 drinks and well you can guess the rest we got pissed even Jo which never happens. Met some nice people from Perth who we also ran into the following night hard to resist those 2 for 1 drinks.

The last day we visited Anne Franks house who is famous for writing a diary of her experiences of hiding in the back of house during the Nazi occupation of ww2 it was very compelling and interesting to see the living quarters of 8 people in a small space eventually her and her family were captured and she died in a concentration camp. So Amsterdam came to a close was the city i expected in many ways i guess you have to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate it.

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