I think it's impossible to come to Amsterdam without preconceptions about sex, drugs, and chips with mayonnaise. All of these were around here, but not as seedy as expected. Sure the red light district is all about prostitutes in little glass chicken pens. They're lined up like battery hens. You can get any kind of lady your heart could possibly desire; young or old (try a 73 year old); big or small; Caucasian, Asian, or African descent. And the coffee shops don't sell much coffee, just space cakes and strong stinky weed. These are scattered all around the city centre, and you don't need your eyes open to know when you're walking past one.

We arrived in Amsterdam on Friday and woke Brad, who had a stupidly early start to catch his flight, at our hostel. He, along with Nicola, Sian, and Kat (Nics' Aussie friend form London), were here for the weekend. We were really looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and making my last weekend in Europe a big one. The first night involved a large number of Heineken pints, some Italian tucker, and some chips with mayonnaise.

The next day we had a look around the red light district, then after a bite to eat we rented a couple of pedal boats and bombed around on the canals. This was a great way to see part of the city, although we didn't have much idea where we were or where we were headed. All the canals seemed to look the same. All that pedalling made us thirsty so we found a beer and quenched our thirst. From there the afternoon just seemed to disappear into the evening.

After we dragged ourselves out of bed the next morning, we grabbed a big brekkie next to a canal in the picturesque Jordan area. Next we headed to the national monument in Dam square, starting point for a free walking tour. At the start of the tour the guide said that we were lucky with the weather, as Amsterdam apparently gets rain on more than half the days of the year. As the tour went on it became pretty clear that our luck would run out and a massive downpour caught most of the group unprepared. Most of the group that is, except Zills and I. Our trusty umbrella allowed us to keep a little dry while Nics, Sian, Bran, and Kat got pretty wet. While the rain kept coming down, the guide tried to keep the group together so he'd get a tip from everyone at the end. We had to bail on him once the rain stopped, coz we were too wet, but we did give the poor guy some cash for his efforts.

After we dried out at the hostel and had a few beers we headed out for dinner. The place we found had a bit of steak on the menu, as well as beef tornadoes wit various sauces. These were pretty much a fillet steak I think. We all had to have one. They were really great, especially since we hadn't had a decent steak for months.

The others all had early flights to catch on Monday morning, so they left us at 5 in the morning or something stupid like that. We still had 3 more nights in Amsterdam ahead of us, but not in a hostel, we moved to a nice 4 star hotel. This was mainly as Zilla's birthday present (yeah, I know it was in March) and also so we could spend some quality time together before I headed back to Oz. The room was pretty modern, and had a big LCD TV on the wall in front of the bed. We spent a lot of time over the next few days just relaxing in the room watching movies and episodes of the A-Team, the flying doctors, law and order and a few other English language shows.

We ate out at a couple of great restaurants as well. One was an Indonesian place, where we had what's called a rice table. Basically a bit of a banquet of different dishes. A few meat dishes, vegetables, and salads. All really delicious, except for the tofu salad. Another place we tried was a traditional dutch restaurant, where we tried some bitten balls (fried potato balls with bacon in them) and Zilla had a great big pot of mussels.

From Amsterdam I'm heading home via London, Tokyo, Sydney, and Melbourne, while Zilla's heading to Seville in Spain where she'll meet up with Pat.