DeLuxembourg

Today was a pretty chill day in Amsterdam. We slept in until about 7ish then enjoyed our free breakfast. They seem to have a different definition for breakfast here, as this is the second day our breakfast was toast and ham and cheese slices.

After that we dropped our luggage into lockers (which was a trial in itself as it took us forever to figure out how to pay) and then we went to rent bikes.

Not sure if we mentioned it yet but Amsterdam is big on bikes. In fact every thing is geared much more towards biking than, say, walking. There are large bike lanes and traffic lights for the bikes, often at the expense of pedestrian sidewalks. Needless to say we really wanted to try biking in Amsterdam. 

Our rental bikes came with two locks: one was for locking your back wheel onto the bike and the second was a normal chain lock. It would be great if you could do that in Canada. Maybe you can, I just don't bike enough.

Anyhow, the only hills in Amsterdam are the arched bridges, so riding is pretty easy, with one small problem. We had been in Amsterdam for about 18 hours when we rented our bikes, so we weren't super familiar with the territory. This led to us riding around in a lot of circles, and in one case into a pedestrian only area.

But, we found the floating flower market that was our destination (very similar to the flea market, but selling flowers and bulbs instead of random stuff). We wandered around it, and found some nice shops, which we browsed. The issue with Amsterdam is that all of the merchandise you can buy has either a marijuana leaf on it, a sexy lady, or the xxx that is apparently Amsterdam's flag. So we didn't buy anything.

We eventually made it back to the train station, where we bought some food, and caught a train back to Brussels.

Before we get to Luxembourg however Darcy has a few words on an important topic close to all of our hearts, bathrooms: OK, so there are, as we all know, a bunch of different toilets used in the world besides the kind we all know and love in Canada. There is a certain type that I thought they only had in Germany but they apparently have in the Netherlands, as they were in our hostel. These are ledge toilets. Ledge toilets, as the name implies, have ledges inside their bowls with the water underneath instead of just a bowl of water. When you go in these toilets instead of your business landing in the water, it lands on the ledge to be swept into the bowl and out of the toilet when you flush. This makes the toilet smell more then the North American one and I do not understand the purpose of it. Before coming on this trip I read a blog post about these toilets and apparently their purpose is so one can inspect their BM for health reasons I guess. N E way that is my diatribe about these toilets, not the worst thing every but not great and kind of odd.

Once we arrived in Luxembourg, we were very impressed. Once again, Luxembourg has impressive old buildings, but we were shocked to see that it looks like a modern city. It's not cramped, there are newish looking buildings and signs. Our hotel looks like it might fit in North America, which we could not say for any other hotel so far. Although we very much enjoyed the hotel in Brussels, it was old and somewhat dilapidated.

We wandered over to the old city of Luxembourg and it was fantastic. On the way there, we walked through a beautiful park, with an enormous city wall rising behind it (that we later climbed). Arching over the whole thing was a lovely bridge, the Pont Adolphe, which was super awesome. We had some delicious food (drank some overpriced juice and pop) and enjoyed the music playing in the square.

I know very little about Luxembourg, but I have very much enjoyed the short time we have spent here. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is traveling Europe.

On the topic of pictures, I spent about two hours today preparing yesterday's pictures on the train, only to find that once I had WiFi again, all of my work was deleted because my app syncs from the web, and not the other way around. Hopefully tomorrow morning I will have an opportunity to get something up there from the last two days.