Amsterdam pictures!

I went away for a long bank holiday weekend in Amsterdam with one of my friends and her two girl friends. It was a really great time, but I wish I had just one more day there so I could have cycled around the city.

We stayed in a hostel right near everything:

The entrance is right into a bar/club and smoking den. The rooms are on top of all this.

The hostel was really cute. The rooms were clean and had it's own private bathroom.  The only complaint I had was that it was really really loud.  The club/music didnt' die down until around 5am or so, so you can still feel the bass through the floor.  I slept okay as I brought ear plugs but two of the other girls didn't fare so well.

If you like canals and water, Amsterdam is your city.  The entire city is dissected with canals and lakes.  As a result there are a lot of house boats along the water.

 Most all of the people in Amsterdam get around via bikes.  As you can see in the pic above, they are very active.  It puts me to shame!

Here is a pic of their bicycle parking near the train station....

What you can't see is that the bike garage in the background is actually 3 stories tall.  My question is how the heck do you find your bike if you left it there for a while and forgot which area you parked it????

Obviously, when in Amsterdam...um...eat pancakes!  I saw that the Pancake Bakery was one of the most recommended restaurants in Amsterdam, so we went there for brunch

Here is the menu:

So many choices...what could we possibly choose?

I had this:

Boobies and pancakes!

But seriously, I had ham and mushroom pancake, while Ms. boobalicious had banana, whipped cream, and powdered sugar.

My other companions had:

Banana-nutella on the left and plain powdered sugar on the right. Oh and that is the Chocomel drink in the middle. Delicious delicious chocolate milk with the pancakes.  Everything was great but it's more like a crepe rather than a fluffy pancake as most Americans would expect.
Lots of pictures following..