Houseboats

There are boats and house boats lining all of the canals. On the narrower ones you only see small boats but on the wider ones you can have house boats, sometimes on both sides of the canal.



Some have smaller boats tied to them and people who live in these house boats use the smaller boats to get around the city.

House boats are very expensive – they may start at 500 euros and then you have to pay to the property which is leased to you by the government. Pretty expensive cost per square foot price!

Canal Cruise

We are bus no. 1. They were supposed to have 3 buses but only have 2 now.

Our first excursion was a canal cruise.


After about 2 turns we were hopelessly lost. Good thing our captain knew his way around the water ways.
He only hit one of the bridges once.



I must say that all the canals looked the same – some wider, some narrower. Debbie for your information, our guide told us Amsterdam has 250 canals and 1200 foot bridges.


They dig the canals to keep the water level down. There are locks on certain canals. Every night at 11pm they let fresh water in from river that comes out of Germany to keep the canals fresh. The water then empties out toward England.



The traditional Dutch house is tall and narrow because the government taxes the frontage. So only wealthy people had a wide house.



There are levers protruding from the roof. Some houses have hooks, some have chains. They are used to haul large items up to the upper stories.


Can you see the gal in the open window?
Our tour guide said most Dutch rent the top stories to students.

Bike parking

Guess how many stories this ramp is? It contains about 5,000 bikes. Yup, I didn't put in too many zeroes.

I already blogged about bikes here. One of the passengers from the previous cruise got hit by a bike and received a black eye. They think they have the right of way above cars. When you get to an intersection without any traffic lights, the cyclist just goes.

An update on the previous cruise passengers. The crew drove a group of them out to the airport this morning and brought them back at 5 pm. It looks like they are sailing with us to the next stop and the on from there until the airlines begin flying again. Needless to say they are very grateful to Viking Cruise for keeping them on the boats. Other travelers are sleep on hard cots at the airport waiting to get out. The "oldies" have breakfast, lunch, dinner, cocktails etc all on the house with Viking until they can fly out.

The latest word here is whichever authority controls the air space will meet on Monday to re-evaluate. With all this going on, we’re beginning to wonder if we’ll be able to head back home when our cruise ends. Becky, you may have to prep & try that case on your own!

The Grand Amrath

The reception area in the Grand Amrath Hotel. The concierge told me that the initials represent the West Indies Company. I think the motif of the hotel is waves and water.


Lee is checking out of the hotel. Instead of a counter, they're in a very nice office.


Stained glass windows in the hotel. This used to be the steamboat ships companies headquarters back in the day.

Ashes to ashes...

The news of the day is the volcanic eruption on Iceland. We heard about it the day we landed in Amsterdam and really didn’t pay much attention. The next day we heard that Britian’s airports had been closed, no flights in or out. Apparently planes can’t fly through the stuff.

Yesterday when we boarded the Viking Pride we discovered many what our Captain called the “oldies” the tour group from the prior cruise still stuck and sitting around in the lounge.

Poor people, Amsterdam closed its airport too and they were stranded. Many of them had gotten up when the airport opened to try to get a flight out - no luck! Finally about 4 pm they were informed by the Captain and the cruise director that Viking was putting them up on board the ship tonight - to a round of applause.

The problem of getting out of Amsterdam also worked in their favor as the next tour group couldn’t fly IN to Amsterdam. Of the 144 expected passengers to embark on the ship yesterday only about 60 actually checked in! So they had empty cabins to put these people into.

Of course travelers thousands of other travelers are experiencing this problem. Hope for favorable winds!

Bikes and books

They have a great culture of bicycling around here. The government encourages their people to bike. The city is pretty compact and like all the older European cities their streets are narrow. It's also pretty flat so biking here is pretty easy. You have to watch out though, I think the cyclists have the right of way and I almost got run over by about a hundred of them. They're on the sidewalks, on the bike paths and in the streets. I see kids in 'boxes' installed on the front of the bikes with their parent cycling them around. Becky, you probably wouldn't do that - no straps!

We got here a couple of days early before the tour starts. They have a fabulous library (bibliotheek). Everyone comes here to hang out. Not only does it have books and magazines, they have rows and floors of pubic computers, ethernet ports for people to come just play games, e-mail, or do home work.

Here's a shot of some of the bikes parked by the library.

This is our hotel. The Grand Amrath. It's only a hundred years and was the center of shipping in Amsterdam. The hotel itself has only been in this building for 3 years. I thought it looked old when I first saw it (and it was) but it's really a beautiful hotel inside! Very modern, I would say 5 stars if I knew what a 5 star hotel was like!

Don't need a gym membership

Lee says that he would hate living in Los Angeles because of all the traffic, but he wouldn't mind living somewhere like New York, or here in Amsterdam.


Why do you say? Well, he wouldn't mind walking here...


I didn't know that Amsterdam was sort of like the Dutch version of Venice. They have tons of canals and bridges. It's really very pretty!


Hi everyone, sunny but breezy today.

How not to get to your hotel...

We arrive in Amesterdam around 8:00 am local time. I don't know what time that was MT but it was very LATE/EARLY, I still don't know which.

Transatlantic flights are weird. They turn off the cabin lights pretty much right away as they hit altitude. I don't know if the psychology of the airlines is "if they think it's night, they might sleep and not be a pain in the b..." or if it's to actually helps the passengers reset their internal clock. What do you think?

It seems to me parts of Europe has a fabulous public train system. At least in Paris (our last Griswold vacation) and here in the Netherlands public transport is convenient and cheap.
Everyone we talked to told us to take the train into Amsterdam (cheaper than hiring a taxi) and there are ticket kiosks right by the bagage claim areas. Unfortunately we were unduly blurry eyed and short on brain power by the time we landed. On top of that, we couldn't read Dutch. After fumbling at the ticket kiosk, (thanks to the helpful man patiently standing behind me telling what to do) we triumphantly exited immigrations and searched for our train platform.

Here he's indicating his general opinion of my uninformed opinions...

Too bad Lee and I got on the wrong train heading AWAY from Amsterdam toward Rotterdam.

I noticed if you (or me) act very lost and confused (which we were) they will very nicely (without rolling their eyes at us) give us directions. They told us we should get off at the very next stop and head back toward the airport...

We finally arrived in Amsterdam. From their we only needed to figure out where our hotel was in relationship to Central Station. We actually stopped several fast walking Dutchman (native amsterdamians?) to ask for directions.

Central Station (pictured behind Lee) is like Grand Central station in NYC. People are in a hurry and likely to run you over (literally) if you're in they way.
I should have bought that Garmin Nuvi! It would have really come in handy. I highly recommend it if you travel to these older cities. The streets have no rhyme or reason and it's definitely very easy to get turned around here.