Europalooza Part 2 - A Fist Full of Euros

Our tour bus disembarked from the ferry and began driving through France. After many years of dreaming about this, I was finally on the European continent. We drove across France and into Belgium, a country of fine chocolates and birthplace of the Smurfs. To commemorate this event, our tour guide Louis played the Smurfs theme song through the bus' stereo system from his iPod. We were to discover that Louis had many songs on his iPod related to the various countries we would be visiting.

Eventually, we passed into the Netherlands. Louis detailed the history of this nation, describing how they had once been a major world trading port, specializing in spices. He also touched upon that the Netherlands had become a very liberal country in the last thirty years or so, and that soft drugs and prostitution were legal.

Our first overnight stop of the tour was in the city of Amsterdam. There are 800,000 people living in Amsterdam, yet there are over a million bicycles within the city. As such there were paved bicycle paths everywhere. We were warned not to walk on the bicycle paths, as local residents would have no qualms about running us down. After having some dinner in the hotel, we set out for a boat cruise of the canals which ran throughout the city. The fact that beer and wine were included in the cost of the cruise definitely added to the levity.

The next morning, we drove out to the town of Edam, home of the famous cheese named after it. We went on a leisurely bike ride around the town on what Claudia the bike lady called "Granny bikes". We visited a place that made cheeze using traditional methods, and also made wooden shoes, some of which were quite intricately carved. This was followed up with a tour of a diamond shop in the diamond district, where we were shown how diamonds are cut and polished, and had the different grades of diamonds explained to us. Strangely enough, the women on the tour seemed more interested in this portion than the men did. The afternoon was free time to tour around the city at our leisure. We walked around the downtown area, had some lunch and visited the Anne Frank museum. The museum was the actual building that Anne Frank and her family had lived in in a series of secret rooms during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Later that night, our tour guide gave the group a tour through the infamous Red Light District. He mentioned to the tour group that if you see a window with a blue light instead of a red light, that means that the woman has "something extra" under her skirt. We had one more night of bar hopping in Amsterdam, then it was off to Germany through the Rhine valley. Stay tuned for more of the Euro adventures of the Renaissance Runner. Same Runner time. Same Runner channel.

RR