Amsterdam

Just a short post to let people know I made it here, eventually. My original flight was cancelled so I had to get the next one, then my luggage arrived on the one after THAT. It's been pretty dismal weather but that's OK. This hostel is awesome. Huge number of guests, cool people, quiet rooms, amazing bar/lounge common area and brilliant location. There's honestly nothing I can fault about it. A lot of people, maybe the majority, are smoking pot, but they don't get in your face with it.

Amsterdam is different to what I expected. As far as I can tell, there's no CBD with high rise office buildings and so forth. Since Amsterdam, unlike Rotterdam, wasn't destroyed during the war, the whole city is composed of ancient brown brick buildings. Quite a few of the facades sag alarmingly in one direction or another.

I spent yesterday meeting people in the bar/lounge and at night wandered around the red light district getting winked at by hookers. The hookers are all behind full length clear glass doors in little dens, and above them are big red fluoro lights to advertise their presence. You get maybe 15 of them in a single street. If you want to make a business transaction, you just open the door and wander in. There won't be any pictures as I'm told that they don't like it (it's freeloading) and if you pull a camera out and start snapping, some roided-up pimp will materialise from nowhere and confiscate your camera and maybe the arm that was holding it as well.

Today I'm going to hang out with a Canadian in my room by the name of Sean and visit the Museum of Sex and the Van Gogh exhibition where they have original paintings of his and cool stuff like that.