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| Tourists |
We took a one-hour train ride to get here from Rotterdam (the trains run every 15-30 minutes throughout the day), and made the short walk to our pre-booked hotel in Amsterdam. That short walk is where the location adage came into play. Turns out that being this close to the train station put us smack dab into the heart of the tourist area (should not have been a surprise). The streets and alleyways are jam packed with tourists (with 20 million tourists per year, Amsterdam is listed in the top 20 places worldwide for tourists). So much so that the city, as is the case for some other European cities, is responding to "locals complaining that their city had been transformed into a 'tourist Disney world.'" Guess we are adding to that situation.
We are also paying for it. Our hotel room, being in the heart of the tourist area, is costing x hundreds of dollars per night for a tiny one-hundred square foot room (at least is has an ensuite bathroom). What it doesn't have is enough room for one person to sit at the desk and the other person to squeeze by the king size bed (at least the room is at the back of the hotel where there is no street noise). That tiny room doesn't have what can be called charm or character (at least it has a working air conditioner). Sometimes, on our do-it-ourselves vacations, we hit the bull's eye with our accommodation picks (as is the case in Edinburgh). Sometimes we don't (as is the case here).
Let's go see some sights.