Amsterdam 9th December 2010

I was only in Amsterdam for two days, which was not enough. I loved this city very much and was not what was expected at all. There is so much more to this city than most people think. So I went with my two Californian friends, Brandon* and Steven*. We were flying from Marseille and there are not any cheap flights directly to Amsterdam so we flew to Eindhoven another place in Holland. From Eindhoven we had to get a shuttle then a two hour train to Amsterdam. We finally got to Amsterdam at around 3pm, it was quite cold during this time as you can imagine, bout 10-12 degrees.

We were staying at the Flying Pig Hostel, Uptown. The rates were good and we had a recommendation from some of our friends which is why we stayed there. The workers are friendly, breakfast is included, rooms were clean and warm, there is no ensuite but that wasn't really an issue for us. The hostel is very central and next to Vondelpark. We got a tram from the Amsterdam Centraal to Rijksmuseum tram stop. It's about a 5 minute tram journey.

Iamsterdam Sign
After we found our hostel and checked in it was about 5pm as we got lost first so it was too late to go to any museums so we decided to explore our surroundings a little. We walked over to Leidseplein where there was a German market as it was during Christmastime. So there were stalls selling, sweets, bratwurst, hot wine, skating rink and confectionery. We had some hot wine then went to get some food and found ourself walking down Korter Leidsedwarsstraat where there are several restaurants with several different cultures and types of food such as Chinese, Mexican, Indian, Italian etc. We saw one place where they were offering all you can eat spare ribs for about €20 which was really good so we ate there, it was called Matias. It is actually a Mexican restaurant and that part of the menu looked good but we just had the ribs which were delicious.
All you can eat ribs



Matias Restaurant Menu

After dinner we went for a walk into the Red Light District which was an experience to say the least, saw Dam Square and explored the city for a while. After that we went back to our hostel to sleep in preparation for the next day.

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