Amsterdam --- the last stop

Back to the west --- everything works, people speak English and smile at you and everything is comfortably familiar.

Amsterdam is different from previous cities: hundreds of canals (60 Km of canals), bridges of all kinds, charming narrow streets with lots of bicycles, quaint little stores, pubs, cafes, restaurants. We took a boat tour through the canals and then walked and walked and walked… We must have covered every street and canal in the center at least twice.

The city is old, beautiful, and well maintained. There is good infrastructure. The 17^th and 18^th century houses are built on wooden piles (not apparent) since the ground is soft. If you look closely one can see some buildings leaning.

We have a basement flat along a small canal in the center of town. Very convenient to everything. The owners, a young couple with 3 children live above. They work for KLM and travel a lot themselves. Maybe that’s why they equipped this studio with everything a traveler might need (unlike the apartments we had in Yerevan and Kiev, which were very sparsely furnished and lacked the essentials).

The food here is great. Everything we have had from restaurant to deli take out was excellent. There are tons of bakeries with a huge variety of delicious pastries. We’ve been eating way too much.

There are several streets dedicated to shopping. They were densely packed with people on Saturday. Shopping must be a national pastime here too. With the dollar up, prices here are not bad at all.