Added a few days to Amsterdam

Heineken Factory.



A picture in Amsterdam, notice all the bikes...



So yesterday we added a few days to our trip in Amsterdam, which will make this leg of the trip around 7 nights here. Today has been a day of nothing but sitting around watching old sitcoms on tv. It's about 4pm and I've yet to leave the hotel. We added the days to Amsterdam due to wanting to be here when Netherlands plays Spain in the World Cup. Other than being in South Africa to watch the game, I figure this to be the best place on earth to watch the game anyway, so why not. Had Germany won their semifinal we'd have been on our way to Berlin, instead we pushed Berlin off a few days to stay here. We're going to be there for 5 days starting Monday.

So, I had my birthday, nothing too exciting happened... we walked the Red Light district and checked out some coffee shops... I've still never been high and don't plan to start, though it's pretty cool how abundant it would be if I wanted to. The red light district is kinda neat though... it's a tourist spot for sex and you see practically everything there, quite funny actually. From the family with two little children walking around, to the little old tourists with cameras around their neck, to the 16 year old kids walking around trying to get some for the first time. It's like going to a strip club with everyone in the world that would normally not go to one. We also checked out the Vincent Van Gogh museum yesterday, so that was pretty cool.

We are staying about a 15 minute train ride from downtown in a place called Zaandam, it seems to be a big shopping type of place. We found a good pool hall that's not too expensive, they have more snooker tables than anywhere I've ever seen. Last night we hung out with a bunch of folks at a bar that we randomly found on our way back to the hotel from shooting pool. We traded emails with them and plan to meet up with them again for the game on Sunday. I don't remember most of last night though...lol. We went to the pool hall with a 1.5L apple juice bottle filled with Monster and Vodka and ice. We drank that down before we got to the pool hall and had a bunch of Heineken there before heading to that other place and drinking our first pitchers of beer, 3 of them. I'm pretty sure we had a damn good time last night, but again, I don't remember much of the last bar...haha. It seems like the two days surrounding my birthday were the celebrations more than the birthday itself.

I'm not sure what we're doing today though, I imagine we may just go shoot pool and have a few drinks later on, as I said, it's just been a nice day of chilling out and not doing anything thus far. It's much needed is a bit of an understatement.

I haven't updated the blog much the last few days, but there hasn't been too much to update, so nobody's missing anything. We've just done a lot of walking around for the most part, oh, and had some pretty damn good Thai food yesterday.