Traveling in Europe Part V: Stairs and Bikes--Amsterdam

Once again, we boarded a train for another city--Amsterdam. So much is said about this city. (Red light district, drugs, canals and flowers) Traveling with our 13-year-old we figured we'd focus on the canals and flowers.

There are indeed flowers everywhere--on windowsills, on houseboats. Flowering shrubs are planted in every small square of soil in the city.

We visited the flower market which was full of bulbs, real flowers, artificial flowers and flowers I've never seen before

Artificial flowers, but colorful.

I have no idea what these exotic flowers are.

Back to stairs and bikes--our very nice airbnb was in a building built in the 1890's. We were on the "first floor." We found out that the first floor is really the second floor and here's a photo of our climb to our apartment.

And then there were the bikes! A great number of folks in Amsterdam ride bikes rather than drive cars. Bravo! But watch out! There are bike ways and walk ways next to each other and sometimes we would weave over into the bike path and get  the ding-ding of a bike bell followed by a 30 MPH bike whisk past you as you jumped out of the way.

Parked bikes.

Bikes pulled out of a canal.

We were not able to get tickets to the Van Gogh Museum, but we did go to the Rijksmuseum.

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A small piece by Vermeer.

We really were about museumed-out by this time, so we did a bit of wondering around the city.

Window shopping. What the heck?

We really enjoyed our neighborhood where we could shop for our own meals and sit at a nice corner restaurant for an afternoon drink.

A day we all enjoyed was on the water. We rented a small electric powered boat and tootled around on the canals of Amsterdam. Believe it or not, anybody can rent a little boat and see the city from the water. It was a beautiful day!

My takeaway was once again the architecture: tall connected buildings, fascinating elegant rooflines, interesting pulley systems near the roofltops and dramatic contrast of colors. 

Then it was time to head back to London under the English Channel on the Eurostar train system.