Got here this afternoon on what turned out to be a gloriously sunny day. The place feels very European and in the sun it’s at its best.

We wandered around this evening after going for a meal. It was the Queens day celebrations today, celebrating the official birthday of the Dutch Queen. Those celebrations will continue late into the night and all of tomorrow.

Sadly my mate Will was pick-pocketed while we walked around the streets. This was a bummer, but in such crowded street he wasn’t very wise with his choice of pocket for his wallet. The outside jacket pocket made his wallet easy pickings.

The canals make the city a really beautiful place in the springtime weather, and you will never have seen as many cyclists and bikes in your life! Cycling is the number one mode of transport here.

My Red Sox cap attracted the attention of an American Yankees fan who spent a while telling me that the Red Sox suck etc etc etc. But it was all in good humor and he stopped talking after I struck him across the back of the head with a broken bottle.
(Okay that last bit wasn’t true, I just wanted to see if you were paying attention.)

To round off the day the 2.2Gb Micro-drive memory card in my camera failed just as I was hooking it up to my PowerBook to download todays photos (of which many were looking very promising I might add). The drive is dead and will have to be returned to the company in America that I purchased it from less than a week ago. When Will saw the card I was using, prior to its failure, he commented that those particular drives have a terrible reliability record, a few hours later he was proved right.

Just to add to that fun the USB ports on my Mac also failed at roughly the same time, so the PowerBook will have to be returned to Apple to be fixed once I get back to England. Funnily enough the European location for fixing PowerBooks is in Amsterdam!

Tomorrow the plan is to just kick around the city, take lots of pictures, people watch with out friend Mark. Sit in cafes drinking coffee and maybe trying some of the local leaves on offer in chocolate form!

The question many of my friends have asked is whether or not we plan to visit the red light district. My answer to that is… “When in Rome.”