Our final destination of our European tour! The Netherlands is famous for many things - cheese and clogs are just a few to name and on the way to our hostel we stopped off at a local farm to see how these Dutch products are made so it was an interesting small tour and we got try some really good cheeses as well!
Amsterdam is definitely on my top 3 list of favourite places we had visited on our tour I don't even know where to begin with this extraordinary city! First of all the quirky houses were something out of a picture book, I never knew houses like that actually existed and people lived in them! Biking is one of the main ways of getting around in Amsterdam and we had never seen so many bikes in our lives - the city was literally packed with them - people who live in Amsterdam can own up to 3 bikes each. You really have to watch out for them - they have right of way over pedestrians and they will crash into you over stopping to let you walk by. They also had a really good tram system there but these were so silent Im surprised they don't have more deaths because of them!
The highlight of Amsterdam for me was being able to visit the home of Ann Frank. I had read her diary twice before when I was at school and never did I ever imagine that one day I would actually have the opportunity to visit where she had to live in hiding for over two years during the war. They have turned the building into a museum of 3 levels filled with extracts from her diary across the walls, photos of Ann Frank and her family, documentaries play on screens as you walk through and you see the book shelf that hid the staircase from the Nazis - and get to walk up the stairs. It was an incredible experience but also a very sad one as well.
We wandered around for the rest of the avo, had a nice lunch and tried to go shopping but it was worse than a boxing day sale in New Zealand in terms of the amount of people shopping - and it was just a Sunday there! That night we went out to the red light district which was such a cool area filled with quirky pubs and heaps of restaurants and of course alley after alley filled with window after window of working girls... again I have never seen anything like it and I don't think you would anywhere else! We went to a proper cafe there so that was cool to check out - we are definitely planning on returning to Amsterdam for a weekend getaway so we can fully enjoy it without being exhausted from a month of travel! Then it was back to the hostel to pack as we were heading back to London the following day where our tour would soon come to an end....
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