Hellooooo Amsterdam!

Right, so I’ve been getting quite a lot of messages going “where are all the pics dammit??”  Well I just needed some time to settle in really… but get ready for the travel envy to start today. 😉

I flew out with Emirates on Sun, 30 June and arrived in Amsterdam on Mon, 1 July.  My travel partners in crime for the first few weeks, Victoria & Darryn, met up with me at the Amsterdam central station, where we also joined two other ladies, Anni & Emma (friend’s of Vo) who were also joining us on the Amsterdam/Rock Werchter leg of the trip.

Amsterdam Central station – we took a train from the airport here to meet Vo.

Taxi ride into town…

We had booked ourselves into a houseboat in the Jordaan area, because well apparently that’s what people do around those parts AND we really have always wanted to sing “we’re on a boat motherf-cker” (like that The Lonely Island clip which went viral on the Youtube)  ** simple dreams hey, hehe **

Our little houseboat was called the Marnix Houseboat and it was equipped for 5 people.  Let me give you the grand tour:

There she is…

The inside of our houseboat

The view

The area around our houseboat

It wasn’t quite as fancy as the photo’s looked on the booking website (but then again, places rarely match up to those “pro pics”).  And the toilet situation was a bit tricky cause you couldn’t drop toilet paper in the toilet, it had to go into a little bin next to the toilet.  But hey, we were still on a boat!  And we loved it.  Also it wasn’t too badly priced – it worked out to 167 euros per person for the 3 nights we were there.

On our first day, everyone was feeling a little pooped from the plane ride over there, so we just took to the streets and did some easy strolling.  Amsterdam is an absolutely beautiful city.  Lots of old school charm, friendly folks, pretty canals and bikes!  Lot’s and lots of bikes everywhere!

There’s not really a lot of big tourists sights (other than maybe the red light district and one or two museums), but I think that’s what I really loved about the place.  It’s more a chill, take it all in, and live like the locals kind of city.

We ended up doing quite a bit of exploring and I’ll go into more detail in my next few posts, but for now I’m just going to leave you with a few piccies we took on that first day.

I’ll tell you more about what exactly we got up to in this incredible city tomorrow, I promise.  I’m heading out the door now to do some exploring in Paris… (yup, I’m all the way over in France already. #lovetravel).

xxx

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