Amsterdam

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We went to the Cologne and saw its giant cathedral and chocolate factory/museum. We learnt alot about the making of chocolate right through from growing the cocoa beans to the creation of the bar of chocolate. We revelled in the smells as we saw it being made, and i enjoyed watching the mechatronics engineers scratching their heads when the conveyor sysytem was misbehaving. Needless to say, we bought lots of chocolate at the shop afterwards. The day we left Cologne, it started snowing lightly. By the time we were 5 minutes out of town by train, everything was blanketed in snow. It turns out that the day before there had been a big snow storm and the route we took to Rotterdam had been blocked from the snow and nothing got through. So we were pretty happy to have missed all that.We then saw rotterdam but only had one full day there, so we only really saw the things close to the hostel, but it was nice nonetheless. We took a short train trip and arrived in Amsterdam yesterday morning. Already we have seen countless shops full of clogs, have past maybe a hundred "coffee shops" (the only legal place for consumption of soft drugs), past all the sex shops and went on a trip to the red light district with another aussie/pommy guy we met at the hostel at dinnertime. Unless you've been here you wouldn't believe the number of times you get offered drugs (most of which are apparently washing powder and vitamin tablets). Of course, Amanda and I are good little kiddies and are not going to touch anything on offer.
I'll now go and upload some photos to the gallery.
Till next time....

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