I woke up fairly early. Breakfast starts at 7am, so I went for it. It was pretty sim­ple one — bread, cold meats, cheese, condi­ments and drinks, but it was nice never the less.

Then I started my explo­ration of the city. They obvi­ously dont like to begin the day early, as the place was dead. The day was going to be lovely and the morn­ing was a pretty indi­ca­tion of that. Very pleas­ant and clear. Few peo­ple here and there and just the bak­eries and few food shops open here and there. I am tempted by the smell and ven­ture into one of the bakeries.

Emerge a few min­utes later with a yummy scroll with choco­late sauce and chips. Very lovely and fresh. No, I wasnt hun­gry, but that has noth­ing to do with this

The archi­tec­ture every­where is beau­ti­ful. I find those nar­row houses so fas­ci­nat­ing wher­ever I see them. They are not just typ­i­cal for this place.
And bikes…bikes are every­where — ‘parked’, fly­ing through, being pushed around, tied to some pole. There are 500,000 bikes and 750,000 pop­u­la­tion in the city. I am guess­ing only the babies, small chil­dren and the eldest dont have one.

Another typ­i­cal thing around here, and I am guess­ing most of Europe really, are the small cars. Australia is not the coun­try with the biggest cars, but com­pared to here, we drive tanks.

I am headed to a mar­ket that is sup­posed to have great pro­duce on the week­end and the street its on heads down to a part of the city I would love to see.
As I get there, the city is barely wak­ing up. The stalls are set­ting up, but a lot of the mar­ket is hap­pen­ing thankfully.

The pro­duce is mouth water­ing. The fruits are really mak­ing me wish I didnt eat that scroll, my belly was pretty full from it and the break­fast. There are a lot of flower stands and they are busy. People must really like flow­ers around here. I dont think I have ever seen a queue for flow­ers before.

Parents with kids were roam­ing around with push bikes buy­ing their fresh pro­duce. People obvi­ously know each other and do their min­gling around the place. Its lovely to observe and watch as the place livens up by the time I go through it.

The sides offer feast for the eyes too.

Before I reach the end, my greed gets the best of me and I get a two con­tain­ers of berries, find a bench and gob­ble them up. I love berries and they are so incred­i­bly expen­sive in Aussie land. I paid 1 euro each for those. The taste was so fresh and the view pretty good too.

Then off again explor­ing the rest of the Jordaan area. The city is awak­en­ing and peo­ple are slowly buzzing around.

I love the famil­iar­ity that devel­ops in the old con­ti­nent between peo­ple. It doesnt seem to be the same for us, peo­ple tend to keep to them­selves to a cer­tain extend. I love that about the men­tal­ity of peo­ple here.

I guess any city after Tokyo will suf­fer in this impres­sion, but yes, the place is not as clean and taken care of as the Japanese cap­i­tal. A lot of garbage thrown on the streets. Shops and places not as metic­u­lously cared for either.

But none of that can dimin­ish the charm of the place. Canals def­i­nitely make a city that much more attrac­tive and beau­ti­ful — the reflec­tions, the bridges, the lack of huge streets.

I reach my next des­ti­na­tion — the Anne Frank museum. For those of you that are not famil­iar with who she is, read a bit about it on wikipedia, it is an amaz­ing story, unfor­tu­nately not with a good ending.

I had seen that one can buy tick­ets online and print them to save them­selves the wait, but that is one thing I didnt bring with me, a printer. So off to the end of the line. The entry is around the corner!

Behind me on the queue is an American cou­ple and we strike a con­ver­sa­tion. They are from California and arrived in Amsterdam in the morn­ing. They seem lovely and we man­age to chat the wait away.

The museum is very well done and explor­ing the secret liv­ing areas was very haunt­ing. A well worth place to visit for any­one com­ing to the city and hav­ing knowl­edge of the story.

Then I am off to Dam square, or just the Dam and walk past some other beauties.

Dam is one of the big squares in the city. A lot of peo­ple ven­ture this way.

The Royal Palace, which is not really used as a palace apparently.

On one of the cor­ners is a Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, but the queue and the price repel me. I dont want to see it that badly, so I go down the Rokin to the float­ing flower market.

The place has just about every­thing about flow­ers — pots, bon­sai, pots, bulbs etc. etc. Lots of peo­ple in this area. As I said, they must really love their flowers.

Then I start up my canal and head back to the hotel. In one of the tourist shops I bought a can­dle­light din­ner cruise, which is sup­posed to take 2 hours around the canals and they serve wine and nib­bles. I need a bit of a rest as the thing is from 9 til 11pm.

The dutch really know how to relax…

The houses are so nar­row that the stair­cases are pretty nar­row and steep too. For this rea­son they all have spe­cial hooks in the front to help with mov­ing fur­ni­ture up and down through the win­dows. Here is how that hap­pens. In this case, it was a fridge. You can see the other houses beams too.

After my rest I am off to my ‘cruise’

Its almost 9pm, but its still light out.

Centraal Station — built on 3 plat­forms and 9000 poles over the water.

The cruise boats, all set up.

After not know­ing what exactly to do with my preg­nant lonely self, I finally get a squeeze with another American cou­ple. They are not quite as pleas­ant as the other one. The hus­band espe­cially seemed very smug and off putting.

Thankfully we dont talk much and just enjoy the view.

The lit build­ing on the water is a float­ing Chinese restaurant.

The most fancy hotel in the city — Amstel. This is where the queen stays, not in her Palace.

And that is how my first full day in Amsterdam ends. I have walked half the city and feel like I saw a lot. Thankfully the city is pretty small, espe­cially com­pared to Tokyo, so walk­ing every where is quite easy.

I am pretty bug­gered by the end and fall asleep as soon as I get back to the hotel.

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