I agree that kids need a little help to learn but, really, if we as adults are gonna be made to endure these programmes at least get the facts right !

One programme that springs to mind, being a favourite of a certain young lady, is Go Diego Go !

If you’re not familiar with this particular programme you may know Dora the Explorer. well, strange as it sounds, Diego is Doras cousin !

Really ! I expect this kind of tenuous link from Hollywood, see Evan the almighty,but from Nickolodian !! This in itself is bad enough but the programme is so full of innaccuracies that I feel obliged to tell the aformentioned little girl what a load of twaddle Diego is. For example, Diego has a pet pooma(yes I know it’s spelt Puma). Ahhhh how sweet, but Poomas live in mountains thats why they’re called mountain lions and Diago lives in the jungle !, Just one of the innacuracies as I see it.

The reason I spelt it ‘Pooma’ is another of the most annoying things about this programme and many more on the ‘one eyed god’, that is the bloody American pronunciation of words ! Pooma, Lardu(can you guess what that is ?). Why is it that they have so much trouble with english ? Everyone knows that in the word Puma the u takes on the sound of a capital ‘U’ and not ‘OO’ !! In fact it’s so bad that some children actually speak with an American accent, mispronunciation and all. I actually know one child who has an American acccent although as far as I know he’s never been further than the end of the road !

You could argue that parents should spend more time with their kids and I agree but you could also argue that the bloody Americans should learn to speak bloody English.

As Eddie Izzard said “You say erbs, we say herbs cos there’s a fucking h in it……. We gave you a nice language and you fucked it up !”

Until next time…..

If you managed to find this from messenger then well done. I might do another blog for you to find

Oh, by the way I’m going back to Amsterdam early next year .

Back soon

I did notice that the buildings looked like they had been built by stoners. I don’t think we saw 2 that leaned the same way. I told T that he should move there because he’s a bricklayer and he could get away with his dodgy work , sorry T.

One thing that did strike me as kinda strange was the Amsterdam version of living statues. Now, anywhere else these people stand dead still and pretend to be statues. In Amsterdam it is totally different, you find people just standing on boxes thats all they do. They just dress up in a costume and stand on a box in the square. At first I thought that maybe the guy dressed as a painter all in gold was just a shit living statue but no. He would just stand on his box until someone came along and then try to get them to give him money to take his picture. Maybe it’s just me but I’m not about to give some clown in a gold costume my hard earned Euros just because he can stand on a box ! Do something man ! entertain me ! at least make an effort.

As you head into the red light district the tourists begin to change. It’s hardly noticeable at first but the further in you go the more they change. People seem,on the whole, to get younger and the dress becomes more ‘easy going’. The other thing that gets your attention is that in the small backstreets the police ride, yep you guessed it, pushbikes. The oddest thing I noticed about the police bikes was that during the day they ride white bikes but come the night they swap to black ones ! One night we were sat in a pub, A insisted on drinking alchohol where as me and T were happy with hash lol, we heard the sound of sirens. We didn’t really pay much attention to them until the mass of people seperated like the red sea and two policeman on bikes went through. I must admit I had to do a double take just incase the hash was stronger than I thought it was. That had to be just about the funniest thing I saw all weekend, except maybe when I saw A woman walk into a street sign, all they needed was the flashing lights on their helmets and I would have fallen off my chair.
I know that ‘smoking’ changes your take on things,  sitting in that bar looking out of the window I felt like I was at a theme park lol ‘Stoners World’. With the narrow street and block paving coupled with the lighting the street took on a ‘fake’ feeling. The only thing that really gave the game away was that there weren’t any families just groups of adults.

While in Amsterdam you can take various tours. One of the more popular ones is the tour of the redlight district led by an ex-prostitute. Strangely this tour seemed to be made up of senior citizens. We would quite often sit and watch the tour go by and laugh at the  old biddies in ties and sunday best dresses wondering around looking at prostitutes. On one particular occasion we were in the heart of the distict when  A  decided that we had to go into a sex shop. We headed towards one which she wanted to visit as it had a glass floor. Outside was the nightly tour group milling around, they decided that they would go in and look. It was like watching a group of pre pubescent teenagers, the grannies were almost daring eachother to go in. When some of them fiinally plucked up the courage to go in they were like giggling kids, picking up the various ‘toys’ trying to figure out exactly what they were for.

I must say that once I settled in Amsterdam is about the best place I’ve visited.It’s friendly and so are just about all the people there. Strangely though there seems to be a large contingent of black guys who seem to be looking for someone, as you walk by them they whisper “Charlie ?”. About the only time we felt a little uncomfortable was in a coffee shop called ‘The other place’. A shop run by bikers above a tattoo parlour.It wasn’t until we got back that A discovered that it was in fact a gay bikers place.

At the time of writing T & A are infact back in Amsterdam for another long weekend. We are trying to get another trip organised early next year and I must say I can’t wait.
Well,thats about it for this write up.I hope you enjoyed it and if I managed to convey just a fraction of the atmosphere you’ll want to go there.
All thats left is to put the vid up, it’s big so it may take a while to load.I’ve tried to use music that conveys the atmosphere. The second piece is especially fitting as it’s called ‘insomnia’ by a group called faithless.
DOH ! gonna take a couple of days just found out that I’ve deleted it

Oh well *fires up movie maker*

Lifes been kinda weird over the last few weeks or so, I’m trying to get my head round it but I’m finding it hard to get motivated to write the last part of the story.I will hopefully get the rest done real soon and I’ll also put up the pics I took.

Watch this space……

So,after 40 mins we land in Amsterdam and the adventure for me really begins(T & A have been there before). I won’t bore you with the whole travel to the center rubbish. The only thing that really sticks out in my mind about it was riding on a 2 storey train. By the time we got to Amsterdam central I had been without sleep for some 24 hours but that seemed to ebb as I started taking in the atmosphere. Before I went T & A warned me about the bicycles and their attitude towards pedestrians, of course I didn’t believe ti could be that bad.How wrong I was ???. As far as I could tell they had right of way over everybody.The other thing that seemed to hold true was that if your vehicle would fit through a given gap then you were allowd to drive there.For example after coming out of the station and getting on the path we soon had to move for a guy in a transit van on said path.
We survived that encounter and continued further into town,I had a small suitcase on wheels which I refused to pull by the handle because it made me look gay. All the way ‘A’ was telling me to pull it but I still carried it,my arms were killing me but I wasn’t gonna admit defeat,so it was with great relief that we decided to stop for a coffee.
After the coffee ‘A’ decided that we should go to the hotel even though we couldn’t check in ’til 2 pm.This was a good idea as it turned out as the hotel let us leave our gear behind reception. So,we dumped our gear and headed into town for my first experience of the famous Amsterdam coffee shops.
As we walked through the streets I had the same feeling as I had when I first arrived at Stonehenge, one of trepidation at the volume of people.As before though this soon subsided as I tuned into my surroundings.To be honest I’m not sure you really care once you leave the first coffee shop.
The one thing that nearly all the coffee shops have in common is the pumping music.The music varies,but you have two main types.Firstly, you have the house music with the pumping bass and rapid beat. Then you have the other type of shop going for the good ol’ ‘Marley dollar’.The first shop we went into was of the first type.
We walked in and sat at the very back of the shop. At this point I was still expecting the place to get raided.Coming from England I was taking a little time to get used to the fact that you could skin up in public.We sat down and had a small discussion as to what we should choose from the menu.It’s kind of weird that the only thing that appears on this menu is drugs and the infamous ‘space cake’,and before you ask no I didn’t have any space cake.I think we settled on Afghan in the end and 3 coffees.If you ever go in these shops ask for milky coffee unless you like coffee with the consistancy and taste of oil.Of course,seeing as how we hadn’t slept for over 24 hours at this point,we forgot this very basic rule.If nothing else the cup of pure caffeine helped keep us awake.We sat in the coffee shop and whiled away the time until check-in,we decided that it would be a good idea to grab some sleep once we had checked in.So, after successfully making sense of the map and finding our way back to the hotel we checked in and got our heads down after being awake for 30hours.

We headed back into town in search of food. It’s interesting to sit in a restaraunt and watch the way in which the crowds change as night draws in, but thats for next time

Today my 6 year old daughter learnt to ride her bike without stabalisers.I was amazed that she basically taught herself,  with minimal interferance from me, in half an hour !

Of course she crashed and burned a few times but just got up and carried on.

Well done
Right, back to writing Amsterdam part two.

When I arose later that morning, 8 o’clock thanks to my teenage daughters boyfriend, I felt sick as a dog. You know that feeling like you’ve been up all night being sick but haven’t. That feeling that no matter how much you eat you still feel empty. I spent all day trying to stop the feeling, afterall the last thing I wanted was to go to Amsterdam feeling that rough.

We left for the airport at around midnight, our flight was at 6.25am. We had presumed that there would be something to do at the airport, how wrong we were. The only thing to do was drink coffee, not a bad thing considering how long we’d been up, and watch some guys racing round the terminal on luggage trollies.
We went outside to have a smoke, it was eery how quiet it was. It was like a scene from some ‘the day after’ type film, all that was missing was the trolley making the automatic doors keep opening. As we sat talking about how quiet it was a tramp came over and asked for a ciggie. I didn’t have a lot of tobbaco left in my pouch, I deliberately didn’t buy any more as it was cheaper in Amsterdam. In fact I had less than enough for one roll up, I told him as much but said he was welcome to it if he wanted it. Talk about ungrateful, he rolled the thin ciggie and almost threw the packet back at me in disgust. The guy then started following us around for a bit after that but we lost him with a swift double back through another entrance, us one, tramp nil .
Fast forward a few hours,not much happened between about 2 and 6ish.Once we were checked in and got our luggage checked in we went through to the departure lounge. Because of the recent security scare at Heathrow they were a little more stringent than usual(?sp).To say security was tight is an understatement. You are no longer allowed to take any liquid not purchased in the departure lounge through. Going through passport control is now like entering a high security prison. I had to remove my belt, my shoes, my jacket and ALL my jewelry. Then you had to be patted down by a guard. All the time this was going on the departure time was quick approaching. We finally made it to the gate , after more checks, and got onto the plane. After about 10 mins of taxiing across the airport we took off headed for AMSTERDAM.

I would like to thank T & A for allowing me to accompany them on this trip and moreover for letting me share a triple room with them.Stories of me,them and the triple room bathroom(no not all together) will follow,especially when I get to the night before we left.

Before I put the stories up please be aware that there will be drug and sex references so if you are offended by such things don’t read on .

Oh, by the way,sorry A, the bedroom vids WILL be aired on this site .

Right, I’m off to start writing.