A day in Amsterdam

The journey from London-France-Amsterdam took almost 12 hours. We took a coach from London, then board a ferry to cross the English Channel to France and then continue the coach ride to Amsterdam. It only cost around 38 pound sterling for that ride.

If you value time over money, other options to travel there from England are:

- train by Eurostar; it travels through English channel via underwater tunnel at high speed and very cool! 

- Airplane, if you are claustrophobic.

Tips!

the public toilet

• If you have credits card, it’ll be helpful because they appreciate that method of payment even for small unnecessary things like train tickets (luckily they have options for cash), taxi or to store your baggage. Weird.  Since we don’t have any, we were left with no option. Backpack travelling it is.    

• Another thing to take note is, they charged at least 40cent if you used any public toilet. This includes toilets in fast food restaurant. Gosh, can you imagine, paying 40sen to go to KFC’s toilet? I thought it was part of their customer service. Anyway, different people have different way of doing things.   

Amsterdam is famous for their windmill, clog (wooden shoes), tulips, brewery, canabis and prostitution.  Definitely, not looking forward for that last 3. Sumpah! Heineken the famous brand of beer originates here and the country allowed people to use canabis, an illicit drugs freely. Lavender field is another 'must see' in Netherlands, but sadly it is not in Amsterdam. 

Clog

A unique thing about Amsterdam is the bicycles riders are well respected on the road. They even have their own lane. The road was basically divided into lane for tram, pedestrian, bicycles and cars. Yeah, it is confusing. We often got it mixed up bicycle lane with pedestrian walk. Poor us.

tram is a train that runs on the road

selalu kene 'hon' dengan orang kayuh basikal..bikin malu je..

Walking around Amsterdam, you cannot miss a sight of their canals. There were numbers of cruisers services for you to get a different view of Amsterdam. Another option to view Amsterdam is via their sight-seeing bus, which covers a lot of their main attraction, of course, with a good sum of money invested. We chose the traditional way, a map, strong intuition and endurance. Their official language is Dutch which is alien to us. Words are really hard to pronounced.  Luckily their people was reasonable to use English when talking to tourist.

Here are some of the view that i captured before my camera ran out of batteries.  

the cruise services

the canal.. there's a lot others with more magnificent view..

vondel park

lunch break at vondel park..we didn't really explore this place.. 

the architecture

see..back pack travelling...a fun way for sight seeing..but when you do it for almost 11hours, it'll torture your spine!

It was a short trip. We covered quite number of places like museums (Rijks museum, Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk), the Dam Square where Koninklijk Paleis is situated, the I Amsterdam, the flower market, the Waterlooplein market, China Town (gosh, China Town is everywhere!), the zoo, and other places that I can't remember. Not bad for a walking tour. We did not go to Anne Frank House which is a famous attraction there with its own historical, sad story. I recommended you to Google and read more about it. 

In the end we were out of energy and my shoes was badly 'injured'..but still we can't wait for the next destination..

Paris!