Taxi arrived at 745 to take us to the train station whereupon we headed off to Amsterdam. Another fine day for travelling and in the blink of eye, less than 2 hours, we were there. Europe is so quick to get around. Another short taxi trip to the apartment where we met our Australian friends David and Lesley. They had arrived earlier after a stopover in Singapore.

There were supposed to be some minor issues getting into the apartment and we had texted D&L regarding this. They did not however get our texts as we had the wrong phone number for the travel sim card they were using for travel. The result was that they rolled up earlier than they should have but the owner was very accommodating and let them in anyway. It is a very nice apartment with an outlook over an inner courtyard.

After catching up we worked out our plan for the day and set off. First stop was to top up the transportation cards left for us. Went to the local supermarket to do this but the machine only accepted Maestro cards which none of us had so we had to make our way to the central railway station and queue to pay in cash. Now we could catch the tram to the Van Gogh museum where we had tickets enter at 4pm. When we got there we were very pleased we had prepurchased these as the queue to purchase them was huge and still there when we got out.

In the museum we joined an English tour which took us off to a side exhibition - not what we had in mind. This tour was comparing Van Gogh and Munch, a Norwegian painter famous for the paintings of The Scream. The commentary was a bit long winded for us so we left the tour half way through but continued looking through the rest of this exhibition which is just as well for there were a number of very famous Van Gogh paintings, the "Sunflowers" and the "Potato Eaters" in particular, that had been moved over to it. As with most art galleries no pictures were allowed so the pictures today are minimal.

The main exhibition was very good. While most of the paintings were owned by the gallery they had some on loan from out of country galleries and private collections. The exhibition was in cronological order and had paintings by other famous artists to show similarities and differences of the artists at the time. It was really worthwhile. Afterwards we found a tram to get back to central where we headed off to find a restaurant for dinner then do some shopping in the supermarket for our breakfasts which we intend to have in the apartment.

Other things made the day very interesting. We knew there would be a lot of bikes but did not realise there would be as many as there were. We learned very quickly to look out for them and the occassional motorbike. Typically they have their own cycle path but sometimes you have to share. Other times we wandered off the path onto their path and would leave us in do doubt as to where we should be! Some were grumpy with it but others were friendly. You certainly knew when you were near a coffee shop and the strongest, rather sweet (!), smell coming out but smelling nothing like coffee.