Who can't help but fall in love with the cockeyed canal houses of Amsterdam? While strolling the streets, I saw numerous sofas being hoisted through windows, hanging from a hook on a wonderfully ornate gable. When I arrived with my enormous suitcase in tow, I laughed when I opened the front door to the apartment I was staying in and wondered how in the world I was going to get up the most narrow staircase I had ever encountered. Very carefully and sideways, as it turned out.
Interesting fact: the houses are narrow because property taxes were based on the width of the house, so people built them narrow, deep, and tall.
Brrringggg! Brrringggg! is the sound heard most often in Amsterdam and the more than 800,000 bikes in the city really keep you on your toes. There are about four times as many bikes as there are cars. Almost all streets have bike lanes and I once did a double-take when looking at a parking garage, realizing that it was filled with bikes and not cars. I love how some people dress up their bikes with flowers on the handlebars, presumably so that they can find their bike in the morass of parked bicycles. It's amazing to see a city with its infrastructure built around bikes rather than cars.
