Day 6 - Amsterdam

Amsterdam Day 1
Well, we "woke up" on the night train. "Woke up" deserves to be in air quotes (at least in my head as I type this), as I didn't actually sleep, therefore making it impossible to wake up. Our "beds" on the train are actually seat cushions rotated to make beds. There were 6 beds in our compartment, but only 4 people. We paid extra for this. We are kind people, weren't concerned with being the first on the train and rushing to our cabin as some of the other passengers were. What this meant was that by the time we found our car, the bottom beds were already claimed and their inhabitants already tucked in for the night. We have to hoist our baggage over our heads, quietly, then climb the "ladder" up to our top bunks, leaving the mid-level bunks open. This ladder is thin, rickety, steep as hell, and it's 1:00 in the morning, so my energy and coordination are at the bottom of my list of present attributes. And I'm wearing a dress. Good thing I am also wearing leggings, because graceful or delicate are not a words I would use to describe my ascent. 
OK, so we're up top. A pillow, flat sheet stitched into a sleeping bag type of arrangement, and a blanket are folded on the bed. So I'm hot from the climb, tired as all hell, cranky and sitting upright with about 2" of headroom, AND I have to make my own bed? This sucks.
Let's cut to the chase. Sleeping on a train is miserable. In my head it was much more glamorous, like in White Christmas where the sisters are huddled in their compartments giggling, and they all walk to the food car where sandwiches and buttermilk are waiting. Nope. It's noisy, like really noisy, and wobbly. I lay wide awake through 2 full stops, which was at least 2 hours. For the rest of the night, I doze a few minutes at a time. Clint slept much better than I, but it still was not a good night's sleep.
Our cabin mates depart in Koln at about 6:30, so we have the cabin to ourselves for a bit.
We arrive at Amsterdam Central at about 10:30. We get a locker for our luggage and beat feet looking for food. After 2 failed attempts at cafes that serve only coffee until 11:00, we find a place that has food, as it's now 11:02. Toast and scrambled eggs with cappuccino and fresh OJ, then we're ready to start our day. Our server here was friendly and funny, at least to us. He could probably tell we were hungry, as when we walked in, we stared blankly at the menu for several seconds until he said "You want eggs and toast? And coffee, to make you feel good?" He knew exactly what we needed.
The cappuccino was great, and the OJ even better. But the powdered scrambled eggs (served with ketchup packets) were gross, but we were so hungry we wolfed them down anyway.
We lazily wander until we find our hotel, a tiny 14 room place on the Single (sin-jl) canal. Bruno welcomes us and hands us our key. A real key, made from metal, that gets inserted into a lock on the door. Not an electronic key like modern hotels. Our room is on the top floor. Now in Amsterdam, property is taxed based on how many meters of street front they have, so most facades are very narrow. So to get more living space, they build deep and tall. Our hotel is maybe 3 metres wide, but there are 3 homes in Amsterdam that are only 1 metre wide, and we saw one of them. Anyway, because of the narrowness, there isn't a lot of space for a staircase. So we climb up the steepest, narrowest, most hazardous staircase of our lives; 4 flights. Gasping, we reach our room, go inside, and collapse on the bed immediately. This time not because we're tired, but because the room is so small, the only way to close the door behind you is to get on the bed and out of the way. The whole room, including WC is probably 10" x 8". Seriously tiny. When we come back later, we're upgraded to a different room, not bigger, but on the front side of the hotel so we have a lovely view of the canals. Still up the 4 flights of traditional Amsterdam stairs, however.
We consult our Rick Steves book and head in the direction of a bike tour. Unlike the tour of Berlin yesterday, this was much more haphazard, chaotic and halfway crazy. But we all survived somehow. In Amsterdam, 40% of the population commutes by bike. We saw the world's largest bike parking lot with over 4,000 bikes, we rode over the smallest bridge, called the Three Herring bridge, because that's how wide it is, rode to Dam Square, saw some old canal houses, learned some Amsterdam history, rode through Vondelpark, stopped for beer and apple pie at a biergarten, and finally, ended with a ride through the Red Light district. More on that later. It was cold and it rained, but we had sufficient clothes and jackets so it wasn't too bad. All in all, a good tour, 3 hours of info and a decent orientation to the city. It was hard to tell what direction we were going at any given time, though, because the canals form a U shape, so they can't really be used as a reference point. Note; there are 364 canals in Amsterdam, which apparently is more than in Venice.
So you can't go to Amsterdam and not talk about the coffeeshops. If you want a cup of coffee, go to a coffeeshop or a cafe. However, if you want a coffee and a joint, go to a coffeeshop. Cafes serve coffee and pastries, while coffeeshops sell coffee and weed. Apparently, you walk in and are presented with a menu, the different strengths and attributes of the different marijuana they offer. Pre-rolled joints for about €2.50 - €14 if you want to forget who you are and act like Jason Bourne. We did not partake aside from the contact high we got just walking down the street. The aroma is unmistakable and it was coming from every direction. By people riding past on their bikes, people at coffeeshops sitting outside or in an open window with a joint and a beer. Head shops everywhere. There are many seed shops also where you buy the seeds to grow your own. Soft drugs are legal and they are everywhere. EVERYWHERE!
This evening, after a dinner of fast-food felafel sandwich (that we had to ask for withOUT ketchup), we meet with Kimberly, an American ExPat who gives tours of the Red Light district. She explains the different quarters where you can shop by preference, such as the African quarter, Eastern European quarter, and Blue Light quarter (lady boys, trannies, whatever you want to call the she-males) quarters. The girls are in windowed doors. If you want a girl, you tap her window and she will either open it for you or not. When you see the door close and curtains drawn, you know she's busy. For €50, you get the basic "suck and a fuck." Some of the girls have all kinds of "toys" hanging from the walls, maybe suggesting that they offer different specialties. Men stand on the streets advertising their peep shows and live sex shows, boutiques selling every kind of sex accessory you can think of, and many more that you can't. There are many bars and it's crowded with people, many of them coming and going from the girls' windows. There is a shop with the world's most expensive vibrator at €12.000, as it's solid gold. You can imagine that a solid gold vibrato for only €12.000 isn't very big. There is an entire store dedicated to vibrators that you connect to your iPhone. They even look sleek and modern like they were designed by Steve Jobs. I can only imagine the advertising campaign: "Want an orgasm? There's an app for that." Apparently it's a lot of fun to find a bar with a view of a couple windows and time the customer's visits and the girls' popularity. The "basic" €50 experience is capped at 15 min, but according to our guide, they rarely last that long. 
Exhausted, we walk back through the Red Light district just for fun once more (oh yeah, and I got winked at and had a door opened to me) and crash back at our tiny hotel for the night.