Day 1 – Travel day

2006 Europe Trip Blog

9/11/2006 – Day 1 – Travel day

Today we begin our European vacation trip by flying from Maine to Amsterdam, Netherlands where we will start our tour.  Leaving Maine in the U. S. on the 10^th, we arrived in Amsterdam on the 11^th.  We are not a day early just arriving early in the day we are to meet our tour for the meet and greet.  We arrived at the hotel around 10:00am and after dropping our luggage at the concierge, we decide to walk around the area.

After getting a map from the hotel, we begin walking around.  We know that tomorrow we have a city tour scheduled and we might see some things twice.  In any case, this seems to be a typical canal and road system in the city.  House, road, canal apparently you could live in either of them.

While we are walking around, we have seen a number of unusual boats and paint jobs.  But, this one is the most unusual.  The boat is a shoe!  Was there an old nursery rhyme about a wooden shoe boat?

Some of the boats are actually people’s houses.  Look at this houseboat.  It has a dinette table with a candelabrum!  Curtains and plants, everything you need for the house. 

Traveling around the city with no specific plan we somehow came across this plaza that has a 3D version of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch painting.  The bronze statues bring to life 22 characters from the painting completed in 1642.  The statues take up 50 feet wide and 23 feet deep of space in the gardens of Chateau St. Gerlach

We stopped in at a store for wooden clogs.  As you can clearly see, they come in many sizes and many, many color combinations.  I know you want to ask, so I’ll tell you; NO we did not buy any.

As we are walking around town, we happen to be in the right place at the right time to see this beer wagon.  It is a real horse drawn beer wagon!  These are Heineken beer kegs sitting in the back of the wagon. 

Check out these houses.  Some of them are leaning on their neighbors.  I wonder if the floors inside are also on a slant.  Must be really ruff walking if you’ve been drinking.

This is the Royal Palace of Amsterdam.  Originally built as the Town Hall of Amsterdam, it opened in 1655.  After a revolt, the new republic was forced to accept Louis Napoleon, brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, as King Louis I and converted the building to his royal palace.

Check out the statue that is at the top of the Royal Palace near the clock.  It is pretty elaborate and that must have taken some time to make back in the 1650’s.

Now this is interesting.  It is a parking garage for bicycles!  Thousands of bicycles are in the garage.  People take either a boat, train, or bus to this location where the commuter picks up their bicycle and rides to work.  We even saw several women in dresses and high heels riding bicycles.

It is interesting, we got a bottle of water from a store while walking around; it cost 2 ½ euro.  Now considering a euro is about $2.50 US that brings the water to about $6.25 US.  As we are getting near the hotel we see a McDonalds and decided to go in to get a bottle of water.  It is only 1 euro so we get several for tonight.

A little tired from flying all night, we head back to the hotel for a short nap before meeting everyone for dinner and the meet and greet.  After we get all of the instructions from the tour guide, including the time to meet tomorrow for our city tour and canal boat ride, we decided to walk down to the Red Light district.  Several of the others on the tour with us hear our discussion and ask if they can come with us.  The more the merrier.  On our way, I stop for this hotel that is all lit up across the canal.

I am only going to show this one picture of the Red Light District.  But, there were alleyways where women would pose in front of a picture window, dressed is all sorts of clothing or not.  There were shows and shops and there was also a sex museum.  What, you can not see anything because it is too dark?  Too bad!  After walking around a little, and we weren’t the only ones, we headed back to the hotel.  Tomorrow we go on a canal boat ride then a tour of the city with a stop at a diamond factory.  Carmen will love that!