Wednesday, August 19, 2009

BBQ @ Amsterdamse Bos

My work team had a BBQ at Amsterdamse Bos park this evening. It's a lovely huge park with bicycle and horse tracks everywhere. We arrived about 6pm and started cooking around 7. Everyone else seemed to be playing some kind of sport or doing some kind of fitness activity so we enjoyed watching.

We took the 170 bus from near our work, but it also goes from Centraal Station, you can also get the 172.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Amsterdam Library

We decided to visit and join the Amsterdam library on our walk today. We can sum it up in just one word: wow.

However, just a few more words:

Open every day from 10am till 10pm, with 9 floors of books, DVDs, CDs and wireless free Internet access!

Sign-up was easy; at the front desk with passports and proof of address we had our cards in under 5 minutes from the very friendly and helpful staff. We then paid our yearly contribution of 25 euros at the payment machine (one on every floor) and headed upstairs to explore! Computers all over the place for searching and browsing the Internet made it easy to find the books we were looking for... this time books on Copenhagen and Bruges and a couple about Amsterdam and the Netherlands in general.

Signing the books out was so easy too, machines on every floor where you place your card on a desk, the computer scans it and then you place the books and it automatically scans their chips... you press yes to confirm the titles on screen and then it prints out an invoice and you're done!

Plus they have a great restaurant on the top floor with a wonderful view over Amsterdam that we plan on going back to... probably next weekend!