Emina and me decided to drive to Amsterdam over the weekend. We found a really cheap deal for a nice hotel near Amsterdam and started our trip on Friday after my work. The drive took 5 and a half hours, there were some traffic jams and the streets were really busy. Our navigation system guided us the whole way to our hotel. Good thing about navigation systems, couples dont have fights anymore about the streets where they are driving. So we arrived happily in our hotel which is called Park Inn Airport Hotel by Radisson Blue. It was a really nice hotel, where we lived in a doubleroom, with a nice bathroom and a huge bed.

On Saturday we decided to drive in to Amsterdam. Our hotel was 45 minutes by train away from the city center. So we used the free shuttle to the Airport, which was going every 20 minutes from our hotel. When we arrived at the Airport we figured out which card we had to buy to use the public transport system to get to Amsterdam. Our first goal in Amsterdam was to take one of the Sandemanns free Tours which started in front of the national monument at the Squaredam.

Our guide was a nice irish fellow who explained the history about Amsterdam in a really funny way. He taught us a lot about the dutch people who are really pragmatic and easygoing. During this trip we crossed the Red Light District, which is really famous in Amsterdam. Even if it’s not a good business in my opinion, Amsterdam wouldn’t be the same fotogenic city as it is now without drugs and their sexworkers. It was really interesting to hear the stories about the sailors who came to Amsterdam, about the golden era and about the whole development of Amsterdam how it is nowadays. The university of Amsterdam played a huge role in the development of the new world.

We didn’t know that before and were quite surprised when we learned that all the countrynames like Australia, New Zealand, citynames like New York and Harlem have their origin in the germanic language of the dutch people.

After the red light district we went to the jewish quarters which is a part of the city where the houses are painted in yellow and where a lot of jewish people lived in the former years.

We skipped the tour for the break and went to the Sexmuseum. It was a funny experience

and we decided to walk around in the city to check out which other sights are interesting to us. We found the Van Gogh museum really interesting and wanted to go there. After we saw the line up in front of the entry we decided to buy tickets for the next day. During the time we walked around the time passed really quick and it became dark. The fact that we wanted to see the Red Light District at night, where we thought its more busy leaded us to go there again. We did but didn’t saw a big difference. Just a stronger smell of marihuana which was everywhere in the city.

We went back to the hotel and had a Heineken the dutch beer before we went to bed.

The next day we went to the van gogh museum. During our visit we learned a lot about the paintings and the life of Vincent Van Gogh who first lived in the Netherlands, where he started to become a painter just by practicing and practicing. He started to draw self portraits, continued drawing pictures of the nature and landscapes. When he moved to France where he spent some years of his life he started to draw peasants and farmers.

Thinking about van goghs history we decided to go on a famous canal cruise when the sun came out. It was a covered boat which drove most of the time on the canal Amstel which is the river running through Amsterdam(Amsteldam). Later on that cruise we went through the small canals, crossed bridges, learned a lot about the architecture of the buildings in Amsterdam and had a good time together. Inspired by the beautiful view we took a lot of pictures out of the boat.

When the cruise was over we decided to try out one of this beautiful restaurants in Amsterdam. Our choice was an Argentinian Restaurant called Flames in the inner city of Amsterdam. We enjoyed the fod really much and headed of to our hotel after this. It was a good journey but Emina and me were really exhausted in the end. The cause why we went to bed early and slept in the next day.