We arrived to Amsterdam on July 23rd to spend a week before our Royal Caribbean Baltic cruise. Neither Keith, nor I had ever been to the city so we wanted to take some time to really enjoy it. Thankfully we managed to find a HomeExchange so that saved us quite a bit of money.
Once we arrived we opted to take a Tesla taxi from the airport (it cost us 60 Euros but it was our first ride in a Tesla) - we weren't aware that they were separate from the typical taxi's as that was all that was offered when we got in the taxi line. I would have called an Uber but we had ZERO cell phone service or WiFi. I didn't realize it, but we should have bought an international sim card so we would have had service while there. Lesson learned. You can buy them on Amazon easily and then you don't have to worry about international roaming or data.
On our first day out, we went to the Anne Frank Museum. It was a really interesting place to visit, especially if you read her diary. I got a bit choked up walking through the space and knowing what they had to endure - especially knowing the sad and tragic outcome of the Frank family. Make sure you buy your tickets ahead of time and typically a few months in advance. They do release a few more tickets the day of and sometimes a few days before. Originally we didn't think we would get tickets as they were showing sold out but I managed to check the day before we left and managed to get two for the 24th.
I won't bore you with our day to day activities (you can see them on Facebook, along with our pictures, if interested) but we did book several tours through Viator that ended up being REALLY helpful and fun. (Email me if you want more details). We took a few canal rides, saw the Heineken Museum, visited the Van Gogh museum, tried some Space Cakes, took a 3 hour walking tour of the city and one for the red light district. The Red Light District was very interesting and very different than what I had imagined. We even took a trip to the Holland countryside to see windmills and how they make wooden shoes. All in all we walked over 35 miles and never once rode a bike. Plus, it's worth mentioning, they had two of their hottest days in history which made for a few uncomfortable days in a city with little A/C.
Amsterdam is an amazing city that is really friendly, progressive and pretty much everyone speaks English, which makes communicating very easy if you don't know Dutch. The food was amazing and getting around was really easy to do, either by foot, uber or bike. We see this as a city we would love to go back to and spend more time exploring. If you haven't been, go, it's a great travel experience!