Amsty

After a quiet weekend last weekend catching up with friends for brunch and going to see Disney on Ice (so cool!), we headed out this weekend to Amsterdam with four of our friends. Getting away from London on a Friday night along with half of the city is SUCH a mission, and invariably your flight is always delayed, but we got finally to Amsterdam and settled into our hotel with a few bottles of champers and some tunes - there is no better way to celebrate the end of the week! Saturday morning we headed into central Amsterdam to have some breakfast and then wandered around the city doing the usual touristy stuff - visited the Anne Frank house, went on a horse and carriage ride along the canals and took a tour of the Heineken factory. Amsterdam is a beautiful city - reasonably small and very peaceful and the people are all very calm and relaxed. The complete opposite to London really. The number of bicycles is incredible and it looked like so much fun to bike around the city in a laid back relaxed manner. We wandered around trying to imagine what it would have been like to live here like Blair and Tanya, rather than just visiting for the weekend, and the decision was unanimous that it would be far preferable to living in London! We spent Saturday night in a local pub in the red light district and visited 'the street' where the local girls sell their 'wares' behind large windows or doors, all framed with red UV lights. Definitely an interesting experience. After checking out 'the street', we decided to have a few more quiets at a different bar but had a a bit of a scare when we wandered down a couple of side lanes that were well lit and had a ton of people on them but were actually as dodgy as a bad curry. We swiftly changed directions and left the district but not before seeing a few dodgy deals go down between some shady looking characters. We passed the day on Sunday eating Amsterdam's famous pancakes for brunch, doing a spot of shopping (so many shoe shops!) and taking a boat tour of the canals. We had a fantastic weekend and loved Amsterdam. Sunday night and we are back in London not wanting to go back to work. Sigh.