At 1am on Saturday morning I finally feel asleep. At 4am my alarm goes off and it is time to get up. Despite feeling like I had a grand total of 5 minutes sleep, the adrenaline kicks in as I know it is time to travel once again. My destination is Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia where I will be spending around 1 month before I return back to Budapest.
Christmas time of year always means high prices on flights. The two cheapest options to KL from Budapest are EgyptAir via Cairo or KLM via Amsterdam. Not having been to Cairo, I was tempted by this. However the cheap ticket meant that no stopover was possible. I therefore chose to go via Amsterdam and spend 12 hours there. Ok, so I had to get up at 4am to do this but I’m glad I chose to do this. It was a great day and I was so tired on the flight to KL that I slept for a good amount of time.
My parents used to live in Den Haag in the Netherlands and as a result I have visited Amsterdam quite a few times. This time, however, I had a local to show me around. I met my friend Linda and promptly hit Starbucks for some tea. I had made this smart decision not to bring a jacket, as I didn’t want to carry it around Asia. Fortunately, Amsterdam was a little warmer than Budapest today so I didn’t suffer too badly for this.
After some breakfast, we went on a Canal tour. This is a great way to see the city – without getting cold! The captain of the boat was pretty good at pointing out extra things too. What surprised me was the massive number of houseboats in Amsterdam. Many of these look like they could sink at a moments notice but still fetch around €300,000 on the market. I’m told the location and permit to be where they are is the valuable part.
The highlight of the tour (for Linda, not for me) was when we passed the smallest house in Amsterdam. It is literally the width of a window and over several floors. Anyway, as soon as we stopped some dude in the house next to it decided it would be a good idea to moon the boat tour. Not what I was expecting to see at 11am in the morning. I think the SLR clad American behind me continued snapping pictures.
Next it was time to explore some other districts of Amsterdam, including one which has a surprisingly cool selection of small boutique shops and cafes. We grabbed some lunch and I couldn’t help but order the Pumpkin soup. My flatmate and I have been making Pumpkin soup every week for the last two months so I consider myself a bit of a Pumpkin soup expert these days. It was good, but obviously not as good as mine 
.
Despite visiting Amsterdam on many occasions, I had never been to Anne Frank’s house before. It didn’t really appeal to me, despite having studied the book in school. I was glad that we did make it there, since it turned out to be pretty cool. The place is small but they really make the most of it with lots of videos and other media placed around the tour route. They know what they are doing too as the videos last only 2 – 3 minutes, which seemed to be about the maximum attention span of a tourist these days.
Sitting having a drink in the cafe afterwards was pretty good. We just sat and watched the world go by. The highlight being the boat that went past selling Christmas trees – complete with crew fully clad in Santa suits.
Next came my favourite part of the day – Bitterballen. These are small meat and potato balls that are deep fried. They taste absolutely amazing and kind of like deep fried Stovies (a Scottish dish). After a few beers it was then time to head to the airport. I grabbed some pizza and then went to catch my flight. I’m glad I ate this pizza since the pitiful meal that KLM gave out was little more than a light snack. Fortunately, I had managed to get an exit row seat (without paying for it) and slept pretty soundly for about 5 hours (the flight was 12 hours in total). Massive thanks to my tour guide Linda and to the weather for keeping it above freezing!
Stay tuned for more Asian adventures shortly…
