Try the Falafels at Maos

Amsterdam was a great time.  We tried to enrich our lives through seeing everything you should in Amsterdam, but of course one can not see everything in such a huge city. I had forgotten my ticket in the hostel in Cologne so I had to take a train back and then met Shawn and Dan at the campgrounds at night.  The camp ground was around an hour out of town, by both metro and bus, and it sucked!  No way around it, the metro was long, the bus took a long time to come and the camp ground made you pay for toilet paper and shower - around 1 dollar canadian for 5 minutes.

We decided to go into town and look around the first night.  We ended up walking into the red light district which is everything you would imagine.  Basically just prostitutes in a room with a glass door.  You just go up and ask how much, as you can see many people do.  Some of them care, or seem to, and some of them will be listening to their iPod or texting on their cell phone.

The second day we made our way into the outskirts of town and looked at the Van Gogh Museum.  It was a great place to see the transition of Van Gogh's work through out his life.  It also had an exhibit on photography through the ages and also an exhibit about the people that influenced him.  We then went into a small cafe and grabbed some beer, Amstel, straight from Holland! Great stuff.

The next day we met up with Josh and Matt and dent into town to try the Falafels at Maos.  THe best part is that you can get a pitta stuffed with falafels, or however you spell it, and then they have a salad bar so that you can stuff it with whatever you want.  As we wandered the streets, you could tell that the shops were filled with food for stoned travelers as they had things such as cheese and pepperoni covered hotdogs, pizza by the slice, and lots and lots of fast food, especially Wok to Walk, which we ended up having loads when we changed form the camp site.  We filled this day by first visiting the Cannabis Museum.  This contained nothing more then a group of stoned university students willing to help you with any questions you may have.  Then under the one tiny floor, you can go downstairs and see their garden of different types and pot.  We then decided to make this the ultimate Amsterdam day and visited the Sex Museum.  Really this was nothing more than pornography throughout the ages and then some ancient sex toys.  After this we went into town and showed the guys around the downtown core.

The next day was one of the best!  Merely because we were able to move from our dingy campsite to a better hostel on the outskirts of downtown.  As we were walking to the Heineken brewery we stumbled upon a crazy parade that was for St. Chris coming to town on boat from Spain...  Yup, I know, but they have christmas on December 5th and then for two days on the 25ht and 26th.  I would like people to take note of this back home. Anyways, the parade had loads of candy and ginger snaps and was pretty fun.  We then went to the Heineken Tour at the old brewery.  It was a great self guided tour through the brewery they used until the 80's and it included 3 beers and a pretty cool can opener.  Great tour and a great price, also learnt a thing or two about beer, and then drank it, so that was good.  That night we decided to check out a pub crawl that we had heard about at the hostel since we wanted to see a bit of the upper town where we were staying.

The next day Josh, Shawn, Matt and I went on a tour of the canals.  The boat also had a commentary about what we passed, but it was pretty boring and useless, so we decided to sit outside for most of it and just enjoy the ride.  After a pretty relaxing ride along the rivers of Amsterdam, which I thought were much nicer than Venice's, we rented some bikes from a local shop.  Well it wasn't 5 minutes before Matt, Josh and I had lost Shawn and Dan.  We went up along the canals to Haarlem and saw the windmill there and then into town where we quickly got onto some side roads since it was pretty insane trying to bike with all those tourists!  But we all made it back to the hostel in our own time, with Matt losing us 2 minutes from the shop.  We decided to go on the pub crawl again since it was so fun the time before.  Maybe it wasn't so spectacular an idea?

The next day it was off to Ireland for a fairly rough 2 hour plane ride!