"My hometown Amsterdam" a Amsterdam Travel Page by Nelson1979

Amsterdam is the city I was born. I am 25 now and have lived here most of my life. It's a great relaxed city, it's windmills, it's cheese, it's drugs, it's the red light district, it's the gay capital of Europe, it's Anne Frank, but it's more than all that. It's a place you'll have to experience. I look at it as a big open-air museum.

As I used to be a guide on the canalboats in Amsterdam for two years I will try to tell you as much as i know about Amsterdam. I'll start with the beautuful canals. The canals in Amsterdam were dug to enlarge the city when it was starting to become a bigger city because of the international trade. Along the canals rich merchants would settle and also had their warehouses along these canals. Since all the goods arrived in Amsterdam on big ships, in the harbor they would put everything onto smaller boats and with them they could reach the warehouses along the canals. There they would store their goods. We have three main canals, Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht. There are also 2 canals named Singel, those were dug as fortification canals.

Bikes and Amsterdam go together. Everybody has one and if not then you should steal one. That's the joke everybody makes since they get stolen here so often. Usually the lock around the bike is twice as expensive as the bike. My last bike was stolen after a visit to the movies. The canals in Amsterdam are 3 meters deep, in Amsterdam we usually say: 1 meter of water, 1 meter of mud and 1 meter of bikes since every year they find more then 15.000 bikes in the canals. A fact is also that Amsterdam has got more bikes than inhabitants we have around 1 million bikes in town and 750.000 inhabitants. Can anybody tell me where i can find those remaining 250.000 bikes ? mine was stolen recently. MacBike rents out bikes to tourists and I can understand that if you want to experience amsterdam to the max you need to do what the locals do, so this means also ride a bike, but I am not gonna promote that here. I am completely against it since a tourist without experience cannot move around the city safely on a bike just the way a local would do with years of experience. It's dangerous, and only a local can bike around without getting hurt. On a bike you have to deal with cars, busses, trams, pedestrians, other bikes, etc. I have seen many tourists falling and getting hurt on one of those famous MacBikes.

CHECK OUT MY TRAVEL PAGES FOR THE REST OF THE INFORMATION ABOUT AMSTERDAM