I have really mixed feelings about this city. It is really beautiful and quaint, lots of canals and little bridges and lots of ducks and everyone rides bikes. But it also doesn't *feel* like a city. It's hard to imagine people actually living here, which is fair enough because it only has a population of 750 000. To that extent Brussels felt more real, more livable. But Amsterdam is really beautiful and like always I am a bit sad to leave. We were going to rent bicycles today but it rained, AGAIN. grr.
One of the things that really is unique here is the red light district. We had a wander during the daytime and then did a guided tour with a group at night. It really is the only place in the world like it. Prostitution is legal here - they pay tax and have their own union. They pay to rent out windows on the street and then charge men whatever they want to. Even in the daytime there were girls in the windows. The best word I can come up with for it is unique.
We did the walking tour with New Amsterdam (the Dutch branch of the company we worked for in Paris) and it was really odd to be on the receiving end of the 'free' tour. We made friends with the guide Micaela (from New York) who we spent an afternoon with. We also checked out the famous floating flower market on the one sunny day we had here. It was great, although we didn't actually buy anything - our ski instructor's apartment in Kaprun isn't really the place for a garden.
Tom has been trying to learn a little bit of Dutch with hilarious results. He strugggles to pronounce anything correctly, ends up ordering mostly in German and then chucks in a 'oui' or 'merci' or 's'il vous plait' at the end which REALLY confuses them. He also tried to buy banana milk at the supermarket the other day, managed to make the wrong choice between 'melk' and 'vla', and ended up drinking a litre of custard because he wanted to get his money's worth.
Amsterdam is also a LOT cheaper than Paris. To put that more intelligently: leaving Paris has made me realise how expensive it was. Food here, tram tickets, everything is cheaper which is a pleasant surprise. We also managed to find waffles just around the corner from the hotel which cheered me up cause I was going to miss the great waffles we had in Belgium. While we're on the topic of Belgium, I just want to add my last remarks on Brussels - one thing that I found amazing were the languages. We were in a Flemish part of Belgium but the 'official' language of Brussels is French -that meant that different parts of the city chose which language to use so it was hard to remember which country we were in. It was wierd ordering in French off a menu written in Flemish (which to us just looked like Dutch - loots of douuble vooweels.) One of our highlights in Brussels was going up to the top floor of a giant parking garage in the middle of the city (following the advice of our budget travel guide) to get a fantastic view of the city. A lot of it looked and felt like Paris, but more real at the same time. The cute old buildings were broken up by newer ones and skyscrapers as well - it felt like a realer version of Paris. If that makes any sense at all. It even made Tom use the word 'juxtaposition' in conversation which I was very impressed with.
Hopefully he will write something sometime as this is still technically his blog as well.
Love always
Amanda
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