On a side note, I wanted to point out how NICE everyone we’ve dealt with in Amsterdam has been.  Waiters, store and hotel clerks, tourist information workers, even the tram drivers are all so friendly and not at all annoyed when we ask lots of stupid questions.  We’ll see if all of Europe is like this (I doubt it), but so far we’ve been amazed with how genuinlly nice people are.  I would definitely recommend The Netherlands and Amsterdam as a nice place to visit.

The architecture here is cool too, with steep skinny row houses on tiny streets and bike-lined canals.  If you stop and look up every once in a while, you’ll notice a lot of interesting details in the buildings and the shape of the roofs.

Our first day, Wednesday, we were exhausted from our overnight flights, but we still walked around a lot, had a fabulous picnic dinner, and even got a quick peek at the Red Light District.

Yesterday we had a great time at the Van Gogh Museum, the Anne Frank house,  and walking around an up-scale neiborhood called Jordaan. We took this photo on a huge “i amsterdam” sculpture near the Van Gogh Museum:

And the Anne Frank house is on this street (a rectangular brick building 3 from the right):

Our hotel is really nice and has an amazing view!  We got a great deal by bidding on priceline.com (check out betterbidding.com), so this 4-star hotel in downtown Amsterdam was only $70 USD/night (a good price for this city).  Here’s the views from our balcony.

We have one more day in Amsterdam before heading to Bruges and Paris.