As already stated the tour bus had many attractions that came packaged with it, and as I said some better than others. One of the really good ones was the Amsterdam Diamond Museum, i am going to put a small video clip, which has some highlights on it, but it is not of brilliant quality. I bought a handheld cam corder just before I went to Amsterdam and as the budget was tight, purchased this little Toshiba , which records directly to SD card, however it is of poor quality and I have as yet been unable to edit the clips as I wanted. I think for my next trip, I will go back to my trusty DV tapes as I can edit those and the quality is higher.
Anyway have a look at the inside of the diamond museum, the dark bit at the end of the clip is a room shaped with mirrors which trys to give you the impression of looking at the different facets of the diamond. One of the factorys in Amsterdam is now producing diamonds of 121 facets which is an amazing feet of workmanship ( unlike my video recording).
Next door to the bus tour ticket shop is a Vodka Museum, yes Vodka museum, it is in the package funnily enough and if you wanted to see it as a one off, it would cost 7 Euro each. What a load of rubbish that was and if you are tempted dont bother unless you are a complete Vodka spotter. The only item of interest I saw in there was a bottle of Vodka shaped as a Kalashnikov rifle ( as they say in Full Metal Jacket or something like that the prefered weapon of our enemys).
A couple of shops further on than that was the Sex Museum which if you can get in without any giggling school kids being in there, is actually a very interesting exhibition and not as seedy as you would imagine. It has a couple of tacky items a mock up of an outdoor urinal found on the corner of many European streets with dummies of a prostitute and a policeman doing naughties in there, but other than that there is an interesting array of sex through the ages exhibitions in pictures and items. It is interesting to note that things don't seem to have changed much at all through the years except for maybe the amount of body hair in theose personnal places! There is one area where they cover some of the more extreme sexual activities, bondage, animals and wrong holes but it is clearly marked and you can avoid if you want. They also have a nice Vespa outside, which is the transportation of my dreams if I was allowed!
The last attraction I'm going to tell you about is the House Boat museum, unfortunately we had some problems finding it, in the fact that we we were sure we saw it on the canal after Anne Franks Huis. so we got the tram to the area then walked along the canal looking for it. After about an hour an no house boat, we checked the tourist guide and saw it had an address, we was on the right street but at the wrong end of it aaaaahhhh! Feet were very sore after all the weekends walking but after a pit stop in a local hostelry for toastie and Heineken we were refreshed to walk further up the canal. I have to say it was well worth it, the houseboat was well furnished and had lots of interesting artifacts and a nice slide show of different houseboats. It was quite reasonable in price and cheaper than the Vodka museum. The picture is of Row coming of the boat which was suprisingly spacious inside and for someone my size I could still stand up in there.
Well hope you enjoyed mini tour of Amsterdam, We did go to the Red Light area one evening and what was suprising was how pretty all the ladies in the windows were. Its a seedy area though and not one I enjoyed staying in too long. I dont know what sort of pressure the girls are under to work there, but the night previous to our visit, a prostitute had been murdered, there was flowers by what I assumed was her window, but suprisingly only the immediate windows in her area were empty, the rest were all working! You would assume that there is some pressure on them to work even when one of their colleagues is dead which is sad.
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