PAUL

We got up early on our second day in Amsterdam (5 June) and made our way over to the Anne Frank House. We were really impressed with the way the whole thing was presented with a mix of Anne's diary entries written on the walls and video recordings from the people involved as you moved through the house and up to the annex. Then we went for a wander through city centre again and discovered some other areas we hadn't seen. We also managed to end up on a short tour of Coster Diamonds where we watched people polishing diamonds and setting them into rings. The tour ended in the shop (of course) where I'm pleased to say we didn't buy anything (phew). After some more wandering, we returned to the hostel and crashed for a few hours. With the twilight lasting so long here, we woke up around 8 o'clock and it had hardly got any darker. So with sandwiches in hand, we went for another walk through Amsterdam, this time in the Jordaan, a beautiful residential district on the western side of the city. It's a really nice time to walk because the bars and cafes are coming to life, people are still riding around and you can watch the fancy boats, serving fancy dinners, cruise along the canals and cut through the shimmering reflections of the lights on the water.

On our last day in Amsterdam we decided to try to experience life from a slightly more dutch perspective and so we hired ourselves some bikes and took our chances riding in the traffic. As we rode away from the hire shop on our Oma Fiets (literally Granny Bikes) I felt I was doing a pretty good job of being a convincing Dutchman until Li yelled out and reminded me that I was riding on the wrong side of the road (whoops, easy mistake to make I can assure you). So we rode out to the port, out to the east to find a windmill and then we made our way south following the Amstel (the main canal of Amsterdam) all the while trying to remember which side of the road to be on when we crossed the traffic and to work out who to give way to (all very important given there's no helmets, aarhhh). Then we rode through Vondel Park, which was full of people sunbaking, riding, walking and eating at the many cafes and food stalls. We must have been doing something right to not look like complete tourists because some people doing what might have been a survey or some charity spiel came up to us while we were taking a break and starting speaking Dutch, then English, and asked if we lived in Amsterdam and later someone asked Li for street directions in Dutch while we were stopped at traffic lights (needless to say we were of little assistance). Our final attempt at experiencing the culture was to find a nice café and order Dutch pancakes - with banana and chocolate sauce, mmmm yum.

After we bought our train tickets to Antwerp (we will start using our Eurail passes once we leave Paris) we ended up on the wrong train (right platform and destination, just a little too fancy), but got off at the next station and managed to get ourselves onto the right train. Lesson learnt. Then we were off to Antwerp, Belgium.