taken by ‘Stuck in Customs‘

yesterday, for my birthday (i’m so ooolld), i went to amsterdam for the day and had lots of fun. i’m knackered today though. did quite a bit of stuff, including;

• walking alongside (and then taking a cruise along) several canals. they’re rather tranquil and relaxing. quite impressive from a constructional point of view too.. if you’re into that type of thing that is. i’m not. but i can appreciate it anyway.
• visiting the katten kabinet. it’s billed as a cat museum, but instead of a history of cats accentuated with various stuffed famous cats (y’know.. things you might expect in a museum), it features 3 large rooms adorned with paintings of cats. although i did recognise some of the art, a lot of the paintings seem to have been done by the same person. in 2006. not exactly historical documents of note, but occasionally nice nevertheless.
• casually strolling through the red light district. merely out of curiosity i must stress. i don’t want to get into a discussion about prostitution, but safe to say the concept has never appealed to me. so, the red light district didn’t really do anything for me either. it was however, kinda interesting to see how blatant the whole thing is. obviously, i’ve heard all the stories about ladies parading in windows – but seeing it was still very odd. god knows how they weren’t freezing cold.. double glazers must do a roaring trade. also, i thought they’d be dancing or doing something vaguely enticing.. instead of just standing there. but then i suppose that their customers aren’t really paying for dancing skills so…
• very occasionally getting the whiff of some high-grade. you know the dizzle. really tho’, the dope was nowhere near as prolific as i presumed it would be. it’s probably because we weren’t really looking for anything to smoke, but it really did seem like the whole coffeeshop thing has been grossly over hyped.

all in all, it was a very enjoyable day trip. flight from southampton took about an hour, and we had the best part of a full day to spend there. not bad at all.