Amsterdam

We landed in Amsterdam at around 2pm and caught the cheap 30 minute train to Amsterdam central. It should have been a 15-20 minute walk to our hostel, Ecomama, but it took us 30-45 minutes as we went the wrong direction. The hostel was amazing, except for the construction work to remove some of the sleeping pods, which was quite annoying. After checking in, we walked to the nearby supermarket and bought some food and drinks for dinner. While waiting for our friends, Frankie and Jake to arrive, we started preparing dinner over a few drinks and some good tunes and they finally arrived at around 930pm. After dinner and a few more drinks, we headed to the nearby Bluebird cafe which closed at 1am.

The next morning, Jake got up early and luckily got us tickets online to the Anne Frank’s museum for 12pm. It was a short walk to the museum and we spent about an hour and a half going through the very interesting museum, finishing with pancakes for lunch at the Pancakes Amsterdam next door.

After the pancake lunch, we headed to the sex museum, before walking back to the hostel, buying some drinks and ingredients for cob loaves for dinner. The afternoon and evening we spent enjoying a lot of drinks and the cobs before hitting the Red light district. It was a big night out and everyone was quite messy by the end.

It was a slow start the next morning, and once up and about, we walked to the Vlaams Freithuis Vleminckx chip shop to get some famous hot chips with their delicious selection of sauces.

After the chips, it was back to the hostel to get ready for the afternoon river canal cruise with Captain Jack Amsterdam. The pick up point was across from the Rijksmuseum, which was about a 30 minute walk from the hostel. The canal cruise was amazing as it not only included free drinks and nibbles, but Captain Jack’s knowledge and history of Amsterdam was fantastic. We were all excited after the cruise, so headed into Sports bar for a couple of drinks before heading back to the hostel for a fun night in.

On our last morning, we were up fairly early as Kristy and I wanted to go to the Body worlds museum at 10am which displayed human plasticized bodies and explained their functions. It was quite good, and following this, we met Frankie and Jake at Vlaams Freithuis Vleminckx chip shop again and had some more chips for lunch, before visiting the Van Gogh museum. Here, we saw the massive amounts of Van Gogh’s art works which included the sunflowers, and learnt about his interesting life. Kristy and I were both pretty tired by this point, and we headed back to hostel before heading to the airport at 330pm. Here we said our goodbyes to Frankie and Jake before getting the 640pm flight to Edinburgh, Scotland.