Amsterdam in Diary

I’m going to try and write a bit about Amsterdam before we have a busy bank holiday weekend!

Tonight we’re just going to chill with some beers. Tomorrow, Dave is driving us up to Leeds to meet his best mate of 15 years which should be nice and I see it as A Big Deal. I’ve never been to Leeds before, I really should seeing as though it’s one of the areas I look after at work!

Sunday we’re coming back from Leeds, then I’m having lunch with Annette and back to Dave’s to chill out in the evening, maybe have a BBQ if the weather stays as nice as it is now.

Then on Monday we’re going to Bosworth Water Park, which is a man made beach. I hope the weather will stay nice for that as well; we’re miles from the coast here so it should be fun to go an inland beach :o)

I still haven’t mustered up the courage to have The Talk, haha, I’m a wimp, but I’m hoping we can do it at some point over the weekend.

Anyway, Amsterdam! It was…eventful.

The journey to the airport would normally take about 30 minutes, tops. So we gave ourselves two and a half hours, to allow for some traffic and give us time for a Wetherspoons cooked breakfast at the airport. What we didn’t allow for was the motorway being closed because of an accident and having to go on all the minor roads, along with the thousands of other cars who should have been on the motorway. It took us almost two hours to get to the airport; I was sitting in the car getting more and more irate as we crept along, convinced we were going to miss our flight.

We got to the airport and ran straight through, right to gate and got on with seconds to spare; what a relief! So we were sitting on the plane when the pilot came over the tannoy to announce we are going to be delayed taking off and we have to sit on the tarmac for 45 minutes! I couldn’t believe it! We had to laugh, at least we were on the bloody thing…

The flight to Amsterdam is only about an hour. We took the train to Amsterdam Centraal and then tried to find our way to my friend’s flat. A helpful lady at the train station said we couldn’t take the tram and we had to get on the bus, which turned out to be a complete lie as we later found out the tram went straight there. I hate using buses, I never know when to get off. So we were sitting on this bus for about half an hour, looking at a map, trying to work out when to get off. Eventually found the stop, walked up and down for a bit, completely lost without being able to get on the internet to find out where we are as neither of our phones were working. The Dutch people are amazing! Three different people saw us struggling with a map and stopped to ask if we needed any help, and they all spoke in English right away. You probably wouldn’t get that in this country, especially not in London!

Soooo we eventually found the flat and were ready to relax, but hmmmm…we walked through the door and the stench hit us like a wall. It absolutely stunk of cat wee and just general dirt and staleness. The whole flat was absolutely filthy. The bath was full of cushions soaked in cat wee and laundry was hanging from the shower rail. The bed sheets obviously hadn’t been changed in weeks and one of the pillows had a cat shaped indent in it and was covered in fur. Everything in the kitchen was filthy and sticky. We looked at each other and decided there was no way we could stay there.

So we threw some food at the cats and headed back into the city centre where we wandered about looking for a hotel. The cheapest we could find was 500 Euros for three nights, and that was just a very basic room, tiny room with two single beds set at right angles to each other. At least it was clean, and we could have a shower…so much for a free holiday though! This meant that we still had to go back to feed the cats every morning, which took an hour to get there and back. I’m glad we bought a City Pass, which included unlimited public transport as well as free entry to many different museums and discounts on food in certain places. So travelling to the flat didn’t cost us any extra money.

This is the view from the hotel window. It was very tall and thin; there were loads of very steep stairs and no lift, so at least we were burning off all the beer we were consuming every day!

By this time it was evening. We’d been travelling since 6:30am and I thought the Netherlands was quick and easy to get to from the UK! So we just headed out and had something to eat and a few beers before heading back to the hotel to sleep. We were in bed before midnight, the shame!

The next day was Friday and we were up early so we could make the most of our city passes and fit in as much free stuff as possible. We had a map which was marked with all the museums and restaurants where we could get free stuff, and Dave had a great time picking things out, circling them and then ticking them off once we’d done it. I’ve still got the map and all the tickets we got for the museums and he wants to make it into a scrap book :o)

First thing we did was a canal boat trip. Dave loves boats so he was in his element here. It lasted for 90 minutes and we learnt all sorts of interesting things about Amsterdam. For example, did you know that one million people live in the city, but there are three million bicycles…! Every year they pull 10,000 bicycles out of the canals! I knew there were a lot of bikes, but that’s just ridiculous lol.

Here are a few views from the boat.

Amsterdam Centraal train station.

Floating Chinese restaurant.

I love the clouds in this one (sorry Sonja!)

Seven bridges all in a line.

After the boat trip, we went to find one of the places where we got a 25% discount on food with our city passes. The place was called Blue Amsterdam and we would never have found it without the map as it was hidden away inside a shopping centre that looked closed for refurbishment. It was a very good choice and the food was amazing.

We then went to the Dutch Resistance Museum, which was about the Netherlands during WWII. It wasn’t really that interesting to be honest so we left after about half an hour. It’s a good job it was one of the ones we got into for free ;o) Over the road from this was an amazing zoo, which was also included with the city pass. There were only two hours until closing time but we went in and it was fantastic. So many interesting animals and really nice habitats for them. Dave is really proud because it was the first time he’s ever smoked a spliff in a zoo, lol.

Tiny monkey!

Bird with an awesome mustache.

Fancy pigeon.

Guinea fowl.

This is a gharial. I’ve never heard of them before, neither has PB by the looks of it as it’s underlined the word in red. They’re related to crocodiles and alligators, as you can obviously see.

I love chameleons, they look so funny.

Wild dogs. Dave was really pleased when he spotted them as he knows how much I like dogs, he thought this would be my favourite bit, bless him :o)

You can’t really see here, but this is a wolf with some tiny cubs <3 We weren’t allowed to get any closer as they wanted to give them some peace.

Piggy with ears that look like Dobby the house elf.

This is a little gruesome, it was in the vulture enclosure so obviously the goat was food for them. But, because we were a bit stoned at this point, I thought it was a really interesting mise-en-scene and Dave thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. People were looking at us strangely. But how often do you see a peacock just happily sitting next to a dead baby goat??

After the zoo, we had another night out. We found an excellent rock bar where we drank too much, and then we smoked too much weed, and then I was horribly sick :o( I thought I had learnt where my limit was by now but I obviously just got too carried away…

That was Friday! I’ll write about Saturday in another entry (we only had two full days.)

Last updated May 26, 2017