Amsterdam 2011 #2

Daytime, on the streets of Amsterdam.

I like the pace of life in Amsterdam. They are visibly much slower than Paris. Our hotel was strategically located right in the centre of town and Amsterdam itself, is a very small city, we did most of our travel on foot.

There are no underground trains at all, just electric buses running on railway-lookalike tracks, simply fantastic. I hate taking the metro.

High concentration of H&M outlets in the centre of town. Almost every street we turned to, I see a H&M store...


Quaint, pretty windows that I like.


Amsterdam has narrow houses and streets.

During the time period in which these houses were built, your house taxes depended on the frontage. Meaning your taxes were determined by the width of your house. Therefore the sneaky Dutch built their houses deep and narrow to avoid severe taxing. For this same reason the staircases are very narrow and low, making it impossible to take furniture up and down them. To solve this problem hooks were put at the top of every house to winch goods up and pass them through the windows on the needed floor.

Because of the heights of the buildings and the width of the streets barely any sunlight reaches the roads, this luckily is saved by the canals which give an illusion of space by reflecting the sky.

The height of their doors are very low, but the Dutch seems tall on the average, so I find this very strange. Maybe, people in the past were much smaller in size?