Today we wander the city to get our bearings. Jetlag was ever present 🙂

NOTE: You can get a better view of the photos by clicking on them.

Some shots along our walk:

Amsterdam is famous for the canals. Here is a good example. The first canal was built in the 1200’s. Today, there are 165 canal that span 50km which is about 31 miles. The most prominent canals are Herengracht, Prinsengracht, Keizersgracht & Singel. There are 1281 bridges in Amsterdam!!!!

Dutch canal houses are characteristic of architectural styles from the Dutch Golden Age. Façade designs in these houses vary as per influences of different styles during this period. Use of gables & embellishment of gables were the most prominent element of canal houses. There are a huge fire in 1452 (when most of the buildings were made of wood) that destroyed most of the city. After the fire all buildings were build out of brick/stone..

Lots of boat tours of the city/canal. We plan on going one next week.

According to the most recent figures, I could find on the interwebs, the 850,000 residents (442,693 households) of Amsterdam together own 847,000 bicycles!!! That represents 1.91 bicycles per household. 78% of people 12 years and older owns at least one bike. Bonus fact:: each year between 12,000 and 15,000 bikes are fished up from city’s canals!!!! Here is a floating barge just for bike parking.

Weed-O-Rama!

Yes, Amsterdam is famous for lots of things 🙂 including their legalization of pot. Lots of cafes and shops sell pot in various forms. Everywhere you walk you can smell weed… and have flashbacks to your college days… or maybe last week 🙂

Here are a few weed items for sale:

These are cans of pot seeds so you can “grow your own”.

How about a nice cup of ~~tea~~ weed 🙂

And some cookies to go with your tea. “100% worldwide legal”… Yeah… Right 🙂

And for you chocolate lovers…

I also saw places selling doggie treats infused with weed!!!! What will they think of next???

With sooooo much weed in Amsterdam… now I understand how the 12,000-15,000 bikes end up in the canals every year 🙂

The Flower Market

Along one of the major canals is the Flower Market. It must be ~mile long and very fragrant. A few shots:

Here’s the back side of the Flower Market. It continues for a couple of blocks.

Man there were a lot of bulbs and flowers in the Flower Market!!! (Who would have thunk it 🙂 )

So, I got me a mini action video cam just before we left for Amsterdam (it is a GoPro clone called the Yi 4K). I’m still learning how to use it but I tried to do a time lapse walk through video of the Flower Market. It’s not great, but you can get a better idea of size of the market. NOTE: The video is a little bit “rubbery” or “Jello” in some places. This is the software trying to stabilize the video. Next time I will use a gimbal, a device that helps stabilize the camera as you walk. So here goes…