Christmas in Amsterdam

Ron and I went to Amsterdam for Christmas. It was my first time there, and his second time. Amsterdam is super weird. I thought it was really cool, just really weird. I actually didn't take very many pictures because its pretty sketchy.... of course I had Ron with me, so I felt very safe, but I didn't want to make it really obvious that we were tourists. Here are some pictures I took, along with some others I gathered of the places we saw - and some interesting facts about Amsterdam.......

When you land at Schiphol Airport, you are actually four meters below sea level.







Amsterdam boasts more museums of any city in the world, measured per square meters. With over 70 major well know museums in Netherlands of which over 40 are in Amsterdam. They cover every sort of weird and wonderful topic, from famous painters to museums on the history of sex and marijuana.

The Van Gogh collections in the Van Gogh Museum and the Kröller-Müller Museum are the largest in the world.








Prostitution is legal in Holland, and in Amsterdam most of it is concentrated in the Red Light District where it has enjoyed a long tradition of tolerance. Since October 2000, window prostitutes have been allowed to legally ply their trade. Today, prostitutes in the Netherlands are also taxpayers.




Amsterdam has over 300 coffee shops which can legally sell up to 5 grams of soft drugs to each person.




The Netherlands has more than 4,000 km of navigable rivers, lakes and canals.

Amsterdam has a house boat known as the Poezenboot which acts as a house for stray cats. A woman who had been re-housing stray cats had the idea of getting them a houseboat – after all, if people can live in them, why not cats? Now gone, the idea lives on as volunteers now look after a boat full of cats.

Amsterdam has 70 glass-topped canal boats.







This is the hotel we stayed at...





Every Dutch person has at least one bike and there are twice as many bikes as cars. Amsterdam has over 1 million bikes but only 700.000 Amsterdammers.







MMMMmmm, I fell in love with this desert cart that sold waffles - they tasted like funnel cakes from the fair!! It was really close to our hotel.



We also ate at a Japanese restaurant, and an Italian restaurant!! We were so excited to have a variety of restaurants with good food!!



I had soo much fun being there - its a really unique place. Alot of the shops were closed since it was Christmas, but EVERYTHING is within walking distance, and the buildings are so strange and fun to look at - they are really tall and skinny and they look like they are tipping over! Ron and I really liked walking around and just being there - I think it made for a memorable Christmas.

Its weird that a place can have so much history and such amazing buildings - and also have weed shops and random casinos and hookers in windows and sex shops ... but I guess thats what makes it so unique! I wouldn't want to live there, but its an interesting place to visit. =)