I have managed to avoid the cold wet winter weather in Sydney for 3 years but yesterday got a reminder of what I’m missing when I got to Amsterdam. It was freezing and raining even though this is summer! The reason I am here is because to get from Bordeaux to Manchester on the cheap, you need to fly through Amsterdam (thanks KLM) so I thought I might stop and look around for a few days. Managed to get a few steps in before I gave up due to the weather but I was asking myself why it’s taken so long to visit this walkable friendly city. The city also has the largest number of Atlas Obscura (69) places I have ever seen. So many wonderful weird things to find! But I have to be honest, the city looks a little the same after a while with it's 150 canals and over 1280 bridges. It is also expensive with a beer costing 10euro. (It has a reputation of one of the most expensive places to visit in the world, so the money I saved on the cheap airfare was spent on beer and food!) There are also more bikes (1.2 million) than people (1 million). Today, however, was a cracker, the sun was shining, so I decided to do the thing that the other 20million tourists to Amsterdam do which was take a canal cruise around the city. I also visited a number of classic sights including the house of Anne Frank - how the Nazi's never saw her through the huge windows at the front of the house was odd! All up the stopover was pretty good but I would like to come back one day and explore more of the Dutch countryside.
