Near the main train station



On our last full day in Holland, Wiwik, Maddi and I travelled into the city centre of Amsterdam by train.  There were a few problems with trains, so it ended up taking 2 hours to get there (I am never going to say that Holland is small again!)  It's actually quite expensive to travel by train - around 45 euros which is maybe about $60! for there and back for 2 people.  The time changed yesterday by 1 hour, so now Holland is 7 hours behind Australia.

Amsterdam was extremely busy!!  As we only got there at 12pm (due to the train problems), I didn't end up having enough time to go to any museums, but we still had a nice day, looking in a few shops, walking around, seeing the old buildings etc.



Spot the teddies



Walking the streets of Amsterdam



There were a lot of coffee shops like this one, where
people can smoke marijuana without getting in trouble.
You can smell it when you walk past.

During our walk we saw a really old church, which was....surrounded by a red light district (talk about direct opposites!)  This area is called "De Wallen" or The Walls.  We walked through it to get to another area and it was...interesting...lots of narrow alleyways where ladies posed behind glass doors in really small rooms and even smaller underwear.  If you look carefully, you will see various red lights in the photo below :

We walked along Damrack (street) which was extremely busy.  Lots of pigeons and also buskers and street performers.  A really good one was a man that appeared to be sittting crosslegged in the air with nothing touching the ground except for a walking stick.
We came back when it was dark at about 5:30pm.  That night we went for a walk along the Scheveningen Boulevard which was very close to our hotel.  Lots of restaurants and shops, also a long pier (jetty) with lots of shops and restaurants.  Very nice.  We were all going to have dinner together but Dad and Wiwik chose The Crazy Piano which was very noisy so I decided to walk back to the hotel with Maddi as she needed a sleep in a quiet (!) location.  It was relaxing back at the hotel, I even ordered a pizza from the hotel restaurant and ate it while reading my book.  Then we slept so soundly that we didn't even hear Dad and Wiwik when they got back to our room!