AMSTERDAM  - DAY FIFTEEN

Previous Blogs: Day 1-3 Queen Mary 2 | Day 4-7 Queen Mary 2 |  Day 8-9 To Belgium | Day 10 Brussels | Day 11-12 Gent | Day 13-14 Amsterdam | Day 15 Amsterdam

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Of course right in front of a beautiful old building

Every kind of honey you can imagine. Never heard of Eucalyptus honey??

A gazillion types of mushrooms.

Some I have never seen before.

And CHEESE, glorious cheese, every type you can imagine and some you can't!

Let's talk about bicycles. This is a city of bikes, there are literally hundreds of thousands of them.

This three storey bike park (above left) at the railway station holds 2500 bikes while the owners commute or travel. The walkways below it (above right) hold another 1500 bike stands, most of which were full.

They have their own bicycle lanes to ride in and these even have traffic lights.

However, they seem to think no matter what they have right of way.

At a pedestrian crossing CARS and TRUCKS and even TRAMS will stop, but NO, no cyclist will even slow down for pedestrians in a marked crossing!

You are fair game and better get out of the way!!

We have spoken about the houses and how narrow they are because taxes were originally based on the width of the house.

Well, building those narrow date back to the 1600s and 1700s did present a small problem in the 21st century.

Many of them are leaning over...

But people still live in them!

>>Left -  House 1 and 3 OK, house 2 nope!

Here's another, the spotted house is leaning to the left by a good margin. At least if you drop your marbles you now where to find them!

Houses don't have to lean sideways, forward is all so "OK". Here's 4 in a row leaning forward!

When these houses were built (16-1700s) the area was very marshy (before they reclaimed the land from the sea), so the houses were built on wooden pilings which over the years have sank and hence the house leaning.

Amsterdam by their people's own admission does not do Christmas very well or even at all. There are no Christmas Markets, no real effort of Christmas lighting around the city - they leave that to Germany who is famous for their Christmas markets and Belgium of course.

Instead they do a light show featuring the art of just 30 artists chosen from many hundreds who submit. These artworks of light are placed along the canals and special boat rides are booked to see them, its a traffic jam, just one company told us they had 7000 seats booked on their boats for Saturday night, never mind the other companies.

We paid a little more than the big 200 seater boats (EU12 extra each) and got a much smaller boat instead (above) with a comfy seating area and 3 free drinks (hello gluhwein) and snacks! 20 people on board. Delightful.

Here's just some of the displays:

Wendy calls them floating condoms, they are supposed to be dandelions

This is Van Gogh's Starry Night but in lights

And finally...

But that's how they roll in Europe!

Did NOT expect to see this drop off a bike!

And what's with the duck tape??

See you all next time - Actually quite soon - we are going to Jordan in January 2019.