Amsterdam - Diamonds are forever

After a great nights sleep, we headed to Amsterdam to tour the Gassan Diamond Factory. We watched how they cut the diamonds and polished them. The tour guide also explained about cut, clarity, colour, and carats. The tour was quite short but they did have a gift shop to check out diamond options. Gassan is known for # of cuts on their Gassan 121 diamond. A brilliant cut diamond has 51 cuts and a Gassan 121 diamond has 121 cuts. It reflects a lot of light.

Once we left the diamond factory we decided to take a tour of the city on the Hop on Hop off bus. As they do in all cities they give you a good overview of the city.

I am not sure if you can see it in the photos but if the buildings look like they are tilting they are. The buildings are built on piles in the sand and there is a delicate balance between how far the piles go into the sand as they will rot if they are above the sand. The ground is not stable so it is quite common for the buildings to shift.

The other thing you see everywhere is hooks at the top of buildings. The staircases inside are often not big enough to move furniture through them so they use the outside hooks to lift items to the top floors and bring them in through the windows.

There are bicycles everywhere and I can’t imagine what traffic would

be like if all those bicyclists were in cars (perhaps like Toronto). People of all ages use bicycles as a means of transportation. The style of the bike is that they sit upright vs most of our bikes where we are leaning over the handrails. I would prefer the style they have in Holland.

We arrived back at Bri and Kees’s for dinner and Roos and Thom (Bri’s daughter and her boyfriend) had made a great pasta dinner for us. They had set a beautiful table and candles were lit everywhere. After dinner, we played several rounds of Mexican Train with tiles that go to 15, not 12. An interesting twist to the game.