Holland Photos!
~Photos taken Nov 2006~
Story Below............
I just wanted to share about our weekend. Thursday, November 9th was our 10th wedding anniversary. We left on Friday, kid free, to celebrate in Holland. We stayed until Sunday.
We rented a top of the line Mercedes and pretty much flew all the way to Holland. We got it up to 142 mph one time just to see how fast it would go. It could have gone faster but there were cars in the way! We visited the Haage and saw the North Sea. No pictures of that because it was kinda gloomy outside. We did walk out onto the big per though and look down into the sea.
We then checked into our hotel, which was the Holiday Inn located in Leiden. It was about 20 miles from Amsterdam. Leiden is where our Pilgrims were from. St. Peter's Church has great memorial in it, but we didn't get to see it because they were having a special event. You can also stop at the Tourist Info in Leiden and get a walking route map. The hotel was very nice. Which in Europe, you never know what you are going to get. It was like a normal Holiday Inn and it had a wonderful breakfast buffet.
We went to the Clara Maria which is a wooden shoe and cheese factory.
http://www.claramaria.nl/?lang=en
We got our own private tour and learned all about it! Wooden shoes date back to the 13th century. They are very strong and have good insulation. The workers would wear them so they wouldn't sink in the wet grounds and they would also protect your feet if say a cow stepped on them. We also got to visit a working windmill at Zaanse Schans. It was so cool. It was grinding up limestone to make the chalk that they line the soccer fields with. http://www.zaanseschans.nl/
In Amsterdam, we got to tour Anne Frank's house. That was very interesting and now we all want to read her diary again. We ate dinner Friday night at the Hard Rock Cafe in Amsterdam. It was located right on a canal; which just about everything was anyways! Canals are everywhere! The food was great and this was a real Hard Rock for those of you who saw the Hard Rock Cafe picture on the Heidelberg page (it is a fake!). Beware, there are people, cars and bicycles everywhere! The bikes and mopeds even have their own little streets and apparently they don't have to obey the traffic signals. My husband said it reminded him of driving in Turkey! You just have to close your eyes and go! At one intersection, we had to inch our way through the people. They just keep going. The sensor on the car was going crazy telling us we were too close to something......PEOPLE!!!
Our nav was wonderful and she got us everywhere we needed to go! We got to visit the Sex Museum which was quite interesting! Did you know that sex dates back to thousands of years and that there is TONS of proof in this museum...lol? Imagine that! And there were old timey photographs of porn. It was pretty interesting. Some of them were dated in the late 1800's. Did they have photography back then? We also walked the Red Light district. What an experience that was! There were people everywhere and I can't tell you how many offers we got for "Cocaine?" "Ecstasy?" The girls in the windows were definitely interesting. And people actually gave them business. It was crazy! There were "Coffee" shops everywhere where it is legal to purchase marijuana. We definitely smelled our share of that too! Wow! We would just hurry up and find fresh air. There were also sex shops everywhere and live sex shows. They wanted 30 euro per person to see a show, so we decided that we should just go into a peep show for 2 euro. We wanted to see what all the fuss was about. The man let us squeeze into a tiny booth with a door. This was smaller than a phone booth. We dropped our money into the machine and the window cleared up so we could see. There was a round bed in the middle with other booth windows all around it. And..... in comes this couple. They lay on the bed, take off what little they were wearing and started doing their business. I tell ya, the look on their faces was of boredom! I could tell she was thinking, "ah geesh! this is the fifth time tonight!" How exciting! So, after two minutes, our window was fogged again and our money was up! It was quite interesting.
So, I have to tell you, every one that we came in contact with spoke PERFECT English! If you ever want to visit the area, you don't have to worry about a language barrier. Well, I hope you enjoyed the story and like the pictures!