Amsterdam

A "Coffee Shop"
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24th April

At last, it begins. My flight over was pretty uneventful except for the fact that I had a Dutch family next to me and across the aisle, complete with 3 small kids in tow and what seemed like mountains of luggage. Once settled down with a welcome G+T and having watched what seemed like endless movies, London Heathrow came into sight through the expected British bad weather!! I made my way directly to the transit lounge as I'd already been given my Amsterdam boarding pass in CT. A breeze. A 1 hour wait. another hour on the plane and I was at Schipol airport. Now to find my luggage which I hadn't seen since Cape Town, and what do you know, there it was, going round and round and round. Unfortunately the pressure in the plane had blown the top off one my bottles. Pretty messy actually but at least I smelt really nice wandering around, as it had been my shower gel!!!

Anything Goes in Amsterdam... Anything

Bicycle "parking garage"
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Now to find my way into Amsterdam by train. Luckily Schipol is organised. The station is directly below the airport. Voila! Bought a ticket speaking Afrikaans and was whisked away on a fast train toward Amsterdam Central. Not 15 minutes later there I was, in the thick of crazy Amsterdam. Now to find our hostel, somewhere in the middle of the red light district! Also not too hard to find. Maps really are useful. Once I'd checked in and sorted out my bed - in a 16-bed dorm!!!!!! [the cheapest], I meandered around the canals and alley ways of the city until 5.30pm, when I returned to the station to meet David. Exactly on time, he appeared looking pretty tired after his early start in the UK. He had travelled from Kent [by train] to London, from there [on another train], to Harwich for his ferry across the channel. Then another train from Den Haag into Amsterdam Central station. Both of us decided that this 1st evening we were going to just chill out, relax a bit at the hostel. There was no jetlag to deal with, just plain tiredness.

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25th April + 26th April

Woke up this morning with such a thick head, muggy eyes and a headache but I slept like the proverbial dead. Dead head and all, we hit the streets straight away. We walked and walked and walked!!! The legs felt like they'd traipsed up a mountain and the feet said 'howzit' by 6pm. But then, this IS a city to be discovered on foot. Hundreds of little lanes, streets and canals, jam-packed with shops, coffee shops [the smoking kind], pubs, hotels, churches, tattoo parlours, sex shops and the ever present 'window ladies', better known as the ladies of the night, except in this city they are ladies of the daytime too!! An eye-opener for the uninitiated. Anything goes in Amsterdam... anything. Somehow the odder you look, the more you blend in!! The traffic here is madness. Cars, buses, trams, people and the national mode of transport - the bicycle. Heaven help you if you walk into one of them. They seem to be a law unto themselves by just taking over and hogging the place. Organised chaos is the order of day. Quite amazing that you never see an accident.

North Holland Canal
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We took the free ferry across to the North Holland Canal to meander around the canal tow paths and the little lock they have there. A pretty suburb but quite ordinary. Amsterdam is also a place where you should look upwards too! There are many narrow buildings, a lot of them very rickety. Lots are being held up with great wooden poles. They have these huge hooks uptop which they use to hoist up furniture and the like, because they won't fit in through the doors or up narrow. stairways. Another way of living totally. In the evenings, we were always totally clapped out and hungry. What to eat!! Doner kebabs!! Very substantial, healthy and cheap. This is all we've had so far but it really keeps you going together with a good beer!!