Utrecht

After a 4am wake up, we got to the train station and caught our 5am train en route to Amsterdam. Of course, because we had woken up at 4am, all the trains were on time and there were no issues with the connections!

We arrived in Amsterdam around 9am and walked to our hostel in the North of Amsterdam (which luckily is very easy to get to with a free ferry which goes every 5 minutes and only takes a couple of minutes!) There, we had a late breakfast and chilled out for a bit.

We then walked back to the centre in the afternoon and went on a walking tour of Amsterdam, learning interesting facts along the way as we explored the streets and canals:
- Amsterdam was named because there literally used to be a ‘dam of amstel’ in 1300, when the city was named.
- The red light distinct is called the vollen by locals. It started because there were lots of sailors coming into Amsterdam and so there was a lot of prostitution which kept the sailors away from local ladies. The church which is right next to the red light district used to be busy with people repenting for their sins and then eventually the church sold "passes" to people before they visited the red light district to absolve them of their sins in advance.
- The structures next to the canals are sinking (which is pretty evident by some of the lopsided buildings!) There is a 20 year maintenance plan in place so there is a bit of construction going on to allow them to fix up the foundations of these properties.
- The buildings used to be taxed in width so there is lots of narrow buildings along the canals! There are winches on top of buildings to get large items into the buildings which are still used by people today.
- Officially, coffee houses are able to sell 5 grams per person per day of weed. The government has implemented programs of slowly trying to limit the use by tourists. Many locals are taught about weed when they are young and are not so interested in using it.
- We visited a spinning house for women where women were forced to work at one stage when they were found guilty of prostitution (at a time when it was illegal - it has bounced between being legal and illegal at various times in history).
- In the Netherlands, there are more bikes (21 million) than people (17 million). You can definitely see this by looking at any street (and even more so when you tried to cross the street!)
- We also visited an area of the city which used to be mostly occupied by a Jewish population prior to WWII. The architecture there is quite different and it is because the area was largely reconstructed after the war. Most of these people were removed from their home when Amsterdam was occupied but then in 1945, there was a particularly cold and difficult weather for the people remaining in Amsterdam so people stole furniture for burning fires and destroyed part of the buildings for materials for fires and to survive as they were all unoccupied.

We finished the walking tour by trying some stroopwaffles which were very delicious!

After the tour, we walked the red light district to do some ‘window shopping’ followed by doing some actual grocery shopping (and a quick visit to the LEGO shop) before heading back to the hostel for a much needed early night!Read more