Amsterdam

Often called “The Venice of the North” Amsterdam certainly lives up to it’s reputation. Canals, canals everywhere! Amsterdam has turned out to be exactly what we both expected, with charming streets lining the canals and quaint bridges joining both sides. We’ve enjoyed strolling along, visiting all the interesting neighborhoods and yes - we did walk through the Red Light District. As many of you know, prostitution is legal here, so there is a specific part of town where the ladies of the evening - and I’m assuming men but we didn’t see any - stand in windows with red lights on above them telling prospective customers that they’re available. While we didn’t see anyone actually propositioning them, from what we’ve learned the person interested somehow works out the price with the through the window and if they’re agreeable, in they go. I guess the women have rooms upstairs where they conduct their business.

The other interesting thing about Amsterdam is the coffee houses all over town which offer marijuana for sale, which is also legal here. Again, we weren’t interesting in partaking, but as you walked by the open doors, you sure could smell what was going on in there!

We also enjoyed taking a canal boat tour through town today. It was about an hour long and took us out to Amsterdam Harbor as well as up and down many of the canals through the city. The audio guide pointed out interesting facts about the canals as well as houses and buildings along the way. We head to wait our turn, though, to hear what was being said as the audio is in Dutch, German, French and Italian as well as in English! Some interesting facts we heard were:

• Amsterdam has 1200 bridges in the city and 2500 houseboats. The city has placed a limit on the number of houseboats so that's all there will be in the future.
• The canals are 2-3 meters deep.
• Because all the houses are so narrow and because in the past most of the supplies people needed arrived by boat on the canal, all houses are equiped with a hoisting beam at the top of the building so they could hoist their furniture, etc. to the roof and then into their homes.

The other interesting thing about Amsterdam, as you all know, is there are a TON of bikes and people bike everywhere! The typical street is divided up into sections, with a wide sidewalk for pedestrians, then a lane for bikes, then a lane for cars, tram lines in the middle. Very logical setup!

Well, we fly out tomorrow morning to Berlin where we'll be staying with a woman named Sigrid and her family who we connected with on couchsurfing.com. She sounds really nice so we'll let you now how it goes.......