Amsterdam ... mini London

Is 2 nights in Amsterdam enough? Well it's not enough to get all the required stories that I like to write about. It's not enough if you really want to smoke and drink your time away. It's not even enough to wander the streets and canals. But that's hindsight and it's always perfect.

Arriving into Amsterdam after leaving from the Berlin station kind of makes it look like a little backwards town. It's a big step down when you go from a heaving glass behemoth to just an ordinary train station. Then thngs start getting strange. We walk across to the "information" booth across from the rail station to purchase a tram ticket. We had been practising our Dutch "Ik wel graag een" etc on the train in and we were all ready to bang it out when the ticket lady yelled at Melissah in English and was really very dismissive. So we lucked out there. We thought we would have another oppurtinty at some point. We jumped on the tram to go to our "hotel" (I am using inverted commas because i think for a hotel there must be some level of service... in my opinion anyway) where the tram driver yelled in English for everyone to move down the tram. Ok. Thats two from two. Surely this strike rate is bound to improve.

It didn't. Not one person in any way shape or form spoke Dutch to us. Perfect English the whole way. Anyone that provides some type of service, sells anything or owns something speaks perfect english. Does this say someting about the only people that visit here? No wonder everything is so expensive here it's like a mini London. The whole place seemed very commercial. Less "look at me I am a quirky city with some cool shit" and more "Hey you wanna by something? Watches, tapes, hash and women... whatever you want..". The whole place reminded me of Rundle Mall but your allowed to get stoned. There were no locals in the smoke shops either. They were full of tourists as well. I think anyone that lives in Amsterdam goes on holiday at the start of summer, rents their house out for three months and lives rent free for the rest of the year. That way you don't have to deal with the mess. They have guys sweeping the streets every morning cleaning up the shitty mess that the tourists leave behind in their inebriated state (ok... it's a bit harsh on me I was also an inebriated tourist, but anyone who knows me knows that i took all the glass panes out of my glass house and it's just the shell of a house now full of stones).

So lets talk hotels, I mean we were stepping down into a dorm to begin with, but this place was crap. The staff flat out refused to give you anything, help you with anything or even admit that they were at fault. I heard them say on a few occasions "if you don't like it leave, but we wont refund your money". I mean I've never been great at dealing with "people" but i don't think i was ever that much of a tool. One day they're going to go to the well and it will be dry and I will probably have to wait in a long long line tell them even though they are thirsty I am unable to share the urine I am about let hit the floor but feel free to go to someone else and ask for theirs. Even the bunk beds were rubbish, the rooms were tiny and breakfast was awful (toastie toastie maker was the only exception but they didn't make it available 24 hrs which would be better). I don't know how to explain its badness. We're not living it up by any stretch, we cook our own meals, we stay on tiny doubles in tiny rooms, not one of our rooms has had a jaccuzzi or spa or even a view, yet nothing has been quite this bad or quite this expensive. This was the most expensive place we have stayed (remembering we didn't have to pay in London) and we couldn't wait to leave Amsterdam beause it was that bad. It tarnished the whole Amsterdam experience, I have picked on it instead of celebrating the liberal and left wing nature of the happiest place on earth. The hotel is on the Black List. (Mel's note: you will soon see why, but I don't struggle to explain the badness of this "hotel". The first morning I got up to have a shower, when finished, it wasn't physically possible to stand outside of the shower to dry myself without opening the door of the bathroom onto the other 6 people we were sharing with, so was drying myself in the shower. Not that bad, I hear you saying ... weirdest feeling, it was like something was scratching my back, I pulled the towel around to the front to find that not only were there two whopping great big holes in the towel, that really took up about 1/3 of the towel, there was actually a massive clump of black hair holding one of the holes together ... now I clearly don't have black hair ... the worst part about this was that as we've said, we were sharing a dorm room, so I couldn't even just walk out of the bathroom and get my travel towel, I had to continue drying myself with this horrible piece of cloth. The next morning, when I went to go say something, the receptionist was having one of his "if you don't like it, go somewhere else without a refund" speeches, so I didn't ask for a new towel, I just used my travel towel. Although Allan may be known for his stretching the truth to breaking point, I haven't amended or added to this story in anyway. Unfortunately for me, this is how it was straight off the shelf)

Also of note, if you ask me (Mel) is the red light district. For anyone who hasn't been ... it was the most interesting evening walk I have ever taken. We were literally walking down the streets of the red light district with families, tour groups, women, men and the expected groups of male British tourists. This place is unreal ... I would have expected the red light district to be full of overweight, bearded ladies ... now I don't know if we went on a good night, but there were no overweight girls, no beards, no tacky clothing... Most surprising though was that they were literally in windows / behind glass doors, and you could choose your lady, open the door, close the flimsy curtain and go in. And people were. I know generally speaking I'm pretty conservative, but even Allan was shocked ... and lets be honest, not much shocks him!

So as we finish off here is a list of things we didn't do in Amsterdam :
- Heineken Museum
- Anne Frank House
- Visit the Homomonument
- Flick the switch
- Van Gogh Museum
- Ride a bike
- Visit the museum of Rembrandt and the museum with the Nightwatch in it
- Visit the Sex Museum
- Visit the Marijuana Museum
- Eat a Hamburger from a vending machine
- Missed the Spencer Tunic exhibition
- Speak any Dutch