We had a late start to the day today - not sure if it was the dark hotel room or the fact that we had a crack at the mini bar last night.....anyway, we headed off to tour the city.

Our first adventure was trying to get out of our hotel room - it is like a rabbit warren. You would not want to be affected by alcohol to either find your room at night, or even to try and find your way to reception in the morning - despite the maze of corridors, it is a very comfortable hotel. It is over a hundred and thirty steps from our room to the reception area.

We ventured out to get some breakfast and Nadeen could not believe how much dope she could smell as we tried to find somewhere for breakfast - despite the temptation, we resisted going into one of the local "coffee" shops and instead had a more traditional breakfast.

We decided to do a hop on hop off canal cruise which basically allows you to cruise 4 different canals and allow you to hop off at over 20 stops throughout the city - allowing you to see the main tourist stops. As our time was limited, we did not visit the main attractions, rather just view them from outside and instead, decided to have a mini pub crawl by having a drink at each of the stops we got off at. This was a great way of seeing how the locals live - despite taking our lives into our hands everytime by trying to avoid the locals riding their bikes everywhere - if we manage to survive our time here without getting hit by a bike we will be very happy!!

To give you an indication of how many bikes there are here, they have built a 3 storey bike park which holds over 2,500 bikes, however, on a daily basis the demand is over 9000 bikes - seriously, you have never seen so many bikes in your life and people of all ages ride around daily - they must be the fittest people around.

The canals here take in approximately 63kms of waterway and they say the canals are 3 metres deep - the locals say it is one metre of water, one metre of mud and one metre of dumped bikes in the canal. The buildings surrounding the canals are quite old but very picturesque. Lots of locals have their own boats and just cruise the canals - with many of them drinking and eating along the way - clearly there are no .05 rules here for people in charge of vessels - in fact there are a number of serious party boats on the canals - it would be a great way of spending a day!!!

Our trip took all of the afternoon so it was a great way of seeing the sites including Anne Franks House, Van Gough Museum, Albert Suyp Market, Rijksmuseum and the Nemo building.

Nadeen wanted to stop off at the Gassan Diamond outlet however, I managed to distract her and we visited other sites instead - this may have saved me over $10,000 euro!!!!!!

Amsterdam is certainly different to other places we have seen -they have a different meaning to their coffee shops over here - you can smell the dope everytime you walk past one. The place is full of guys either on bucks parties or just walking the streets - whatever turns them on.

We will be happy to head to Paris tomorrow and compare the difference between the two cities.

Now we are back in our hotel room having another crack at our mini bar - we are determined to empty it tonight!

By the way, if you are looking at this photo, Nadeen is sitting on the letter T