Ruth in Spain!: traveling 13

I forgot to say, in the previous blog, that we also telephoned House trip re the the problems with the apartment and they were very helpful, first of all they withheld our payment to the agency and once the cleaning had been done and was satisfactory they payed the agency but gave us €80 compensation and will monitor the agency to see what they're about.

So, now to our next day in Amsterdam - canal tour, tourist bus tour and the sex museum all before dinner.

The canal boat tour and the tourist bus tour were ok, not great, but fun to do and it was interesting to see the city from the water. The Amsterdam canals are a lot bigger than the canals in Venice. In Venice we easily got a sense of what the purpose of the canals are and how they work but we didn't glean much of an understanding of the canals system in Amsterdam. The tour guide was rather short on information and mostly just pointed out interesting sites.

the railway station

this is across the road from the railway station. It is a very busy part of the city and was kind of like a mad-house

The bus tour was much the same and after both the canal and the bus tour we still didn't have a sense of the city. After the beautiful architecture of Prague Amsterdam seemed pretty ordinary by comparison. Both were worth doing, from our point of view, anyway.

this style seemed of building seemed to be typical, there were lots of buildings like it

One of the more interesting sights on the canal boat tour was the almost disaster happening to a little 4 person pedal boat. It almost collided with our boat - well, in fact they did bang into us - gently. They'd just got away from us when another canal boat came around the corner and was immediately almost on top of them. Everyone in our boat was holding their breath, it seemed that a disaster was about happen right under our noses. Fortunately, the little pedal boat got some speedy pedaling happening and managed to get out of the way and all was well. Up to this point Emma had been quite keen on doing a pedal boat excursion but she wasn't so sure after what we'd just seen.

The Sex Museum was kind of interesting with lots of boring stuff and some not so boring stuff. It wasn't really a museum because there wasn't much historical information but there were hundreds and hundreds of pictures and photos, I'm sure there's no need to go into detail here.

I learnt the difference between a coffee shop and a cafe - a cafe is where to go for a coffee and a coffee shop is for smoking.

another coffee shop

There were lots of buildings with wisteria growing up them, very beautiful to see and to smell.

part of the bike park outside the railway station. It holds 2500 bikes. Amsterdam is full of mad bikers hurtling along the bike lanes totally focused on getting to where they want to go and woe betide any silly tourist who steps on their way

It took each one of us a little while to become aware of the bike lanes and to get used to looking before crossing them just as we look before crossing roads and each one of us had a few near misses.