My Trip To Amsterdam

This is a somewhat delayed follow-on from my Lille post! After Lille, we hopped back on the iDBUS and drove a few hours onto Amsterdam. We got there pretty late in the afternoon but put our research about the thrifting opportunities straight into action. 

First stop was Out Of The Closet, a thrift shop which benefits the AIDS foundation. It had loads of affordable vintage/second hand clothes and er, free condoms! It's all about safe thrifting. 

 Then we stumbled upon the Waterloopleinmarkt - a market with vintage/random stalls and general piles of people's belongings like so:

Then we went in Episode vintage - there are a couple in Amsterdam and they seem to be the most popular vintage shops. It didn't seem too overpriced and there was loads of cool stock, but I'm a bit 'over' vintage really so never seem to commit to buying things these days...

 We were told we couldn't visit Amsterdam without visiting one of the FEBO chainstores - a 'vending machine' approach to fast food. You put in coins, and you can open the door and get a burger/croquette/obscure Amsterdam delicacy. We weren't really hungry so just got fries, but boy, were they good!

The Dam - hence AmsterDAM, geddit?

One of the many delightful canals. Regular readers will know I'm a bit obsessed with canalboats, so I was pretty much in heaven!

Then it rained. And rained some more. It was torrential. The cool restaurant we were told to hunt down had been turned into a weed café so we were stuck starving in the pouring rain. It truly sucked.

So we ducked into the nearest bit of dry land with affordable food - MCDONALDS. Yep, epic fail all round. Especially since they put pepper on the batter of McChicken sandwiches across the pond which is just sacrilege. Here I am drenched, bedraggled, emotionally unstable but safe at last.

The next day was glorious sunshine and I was SUPER excited because I was getting a behind the scenes glimpse at De Poezenboot - The Cat Boat. It's a floating cat sanctuary and has quite limited opening hours but they kindly tweeted me to let me know I could visit out-of-hours as I'm such a cat fan (read: twitter stalker).

It's basically a large room full of cats - some newbies in cages, and the more long-term residents out and about, who've all been rescued from the streets of Amsterdam. They warned me that they were in the middle of cleaning/tidying so it might look more bit higgledy piggledy than usual, but it still looked completely epic to me! I'm not even a cat and I wanna live there. 

Playtime!

Emo cat #deepthoughts:

We stayed on board for a good couple of hours, with one of the lovely volunteers, Ruth, giving us the lowdown on each cat's story and the story of the woman that founded it. It was the most amazing experience - add this firmly to your lost if you're planning a trip to Amsterdam. I spent a rather large portion of my holiday budget on donations and merch! 

After that, we stumbled upon the Rembrandt exhibition so we checked that out (Alex was enthralled, but I sometimes have a bit of a short attention span when it comes to art...)

Then we found a lovely cheap restaurant I'd read about online - Poco Loco. Yummy toasties for only a few euros!

More canal mooching. Oh yeah, bikes are a huge deal in Amsterdam. I was too chicken to rent one!

Oh how I LOVED Kitsch Kitchen. A shop of bright and fun home/gifty type things. Alex's idea of hell, my idea of paradise. He forbid me to buy some neon plastic ice cream bowls :( Y he so cruel.

This is Amsterdam's big beauty department store. I took a photo because it cracked me up that the store is called Douglas. What went on in that board meeting? Marketeer 1: 'What name exudes pure BEAUTY guys, we need to crack this...' Marketeers 2,3 & 4: 'DOUGLAS!' Whatever next? Space NK changing it's name to Nigel?

Moar catz. This one was just chilling outside a restaurant. I think it's eyes saw right into my soul.

We wandered further afield to the Jordaan district, which was less 'prozzies and weed'-centric than the centre and all felt a bit more local. Lovely walking along the canal at night en route - pretty lights!

We ate at a lovely burger place in Jordaan called Burgermeester but we ate outside so the light was AWFUL. Imagine a very delicious burger being eaten very quickly by two weary tourists. It was heaven. 

And then our whirlwind 40 hours or so were over! Can't wait to go back! 

Have you been to Amsterdam before? Feel free to gimme some recommendations for my next visit :)

xo