Amsterdam! One of the places on this cruise that I was most excited to visit. There are so many unique experiences that you can’t see or do in Australia, so was excited.
The Carnival Legend arrived into Amsterdam around 10:30AM, so we all left shortly after and walked into town.
Ivan and Jen had sussed out a free walking tour that we could do at midday, so we found the meeting point and decided to grab a bite to eat.
We all had these delicious falfel and salad wraps from a local store, they were self serve, so we made them chockas and struggled to finish them 🙂
We then had a look at some souvenir shops, before it was time to meet up for the tour. If you are ever visiting a big city, I would highly recommend the FREE WALKING TOURS, they are completely run on a tipping bases, so you pay your guide what you think the tour was worth. They take you around to the major tourist sights, inform you with interesting facts and history about the town you are in and what to do during your stay.
The Dam Square is where we had to meet, there were a lot of people so the groups were divided into smaller groups of about 30 people. Our guide was an Irish man, who had come to Amsterdam to study a few years ago and knew a lot about the town.
On the tour we visited many places, including the Red Light District, Royal Palace and Anne Franks House. Along the way were saw canals and heard that during orientation week for university, students go out at night and find as many bikes as they could that weren’t locked up and threw them into the river. Every year between 20,000 and 30,000 bikes are removed from the canals!
We also learnt that in the Red Light District the girls work for around 8 hours a day and cannot leave their window as it is expensive to hire a window and they need to reach a quota every hour to be able to start making a profit after paying the rental fees. So they use a bottle or a bucket to pee in and if you are caught taking photos of the working girls, or try to get away without paying, they will chase you and throw their pee at you! We did see one man get arrested for not paying, but he was lucky to be pee free.
The tour lasted for 2.5 hours and was really good. We felt our guide was knowledgeable and showed us a lot of Amsterdam.
Afterwards we went and explored a bit more, revisited a few places that we saw on the tour and bought some souvenirs.
We went to a typical ‘must see when in Amsterdam show’, enjoyed some Amsterdam goodies and had fun walking around the picturesque city.
At 6:30PM we ran back to the boat as we were running late…again 🙂
Making it on board we relaxed for a couple of hours, took some pictures of the boat leaving the docks, cleaned ourselves up and headed down for dinner.
It was our last meal on board of the Carnival Legend so we said our goodbyes to our dinner friends Ron and Lisa and headed back to Ivan and Jen’s room for some drinks.
