Oudjaarsdag - New Year's celebrations in Holland

Scotland is rightly famed worldwide for its Hogmanay celebrations, and every year we see the television coverage of people (or 'revellers' as the TV calls them) in Times Square, fireworks lighting up the sky over the Thames in London, and so on.

But what about New Year in or favourite city, Amsterdam...?

Here are a couple of links giving us the lowdown on the Dam's celebrations:

About.com - champagne and fireworks...

iAmsterdam - and parties galore

Amsterdam is of course the party capital of the world, so it's no surprise that it gets into the mood for the final big party of the festive season. Just make sure you don't start the party too early on the ferry over or you'll have no energy left for the night itself!


Amsterdam Christmas links

Here are a few links to sites with info on Amsterdam/ Holland at Christmas (Kerstfeest):

amsterdam.info - interesting stuff about Dutch Christmas customs - Sinterklass and all that.

GoAmsterdam has some pretty cool pictures of Amsterdam during the holiday season.

iamsterdam picks out the 12 best Christmas holiday events

... and has a guide to Christmas markets and festive shopping in the city


Enjoy...!

Amsterdam news

Some news from Amsterdam this week about Schiphol, according to a report in Dutchnews.nl the boss of Schiphol told the Telegraaf newspaper that "Schiphol would prefer to be without holiday traffic. It has less value for us".


I'm not sure that he meant all holiday traffic though - my guess is that he meant having budget carriers go elswehere in the Randstad or maybe a city further inland but not too far away. After all it's not like every holiday visitor to Paris goes through CdG is it?







Amsterdam - da dreaded de Wallen!

Amsterdam's known for a few things that - ahem - don't get talked about in polite company. A lot of these things take place in the old town area of De Wallen.


But there's more to De Wallen than red lights and smoky cafes. De Wallen is also the oldest part of Amsterdam - one of those European places that when you see it for the first time looks like something from a historical film. Taking pride of place in De Wallen is the Oude Kerk, consecrated in the early 14th century - if you're a bit of a church spotter, this one is a must-see and one of my favourites, up there with St Pauls in London and the Sacre Coeur in Paris.

Getting to Amsterdam:

The city is easy to get to by air or sea, with a world-class airport, Schiphol, that's so vast it almost feels like a town in itself. Schiphol is a short distance to the city centre by taxi.

Amsterdam's easily accessible if you want to sail there, with ferries to Holland crossing from the UK to IJmuiden, a short drive from the city.

And of course if you want to get there by rail, Amsterdam is very well placed for people training it in from France, Germany and beyond.




Vrolijk Kerstfeest!

Dunno about you lot, but I think it would be good to spend the actual Christmas Day part of the holiday season abroad, preferably in Amsterdam.

While there's nothing wrong with a traditional British Christmas, I have to say it's all a bit overfamiliar after all these years - the TV specials, the Stig advent calendars, all the rest of it.

Mainland Europe I think does the season best in all the world - the markets, the traditions, the lights and candles.

Sadly due to family commitments I'm stuck in Blighty though, so it'll be the Bernard Matthews turkey roast and Mateus Rose for me!

Jacques Brel - Amsterdam

Bit of a musical interlude for you today. Brel - a true Beneluxian (if that's a word...) wrote this powerful song that has been translated and then sung in English by Scott Walker among others. Brel's version remains the daddy though.

Shopping in Amsterdam

While Amsterdam is a big city, it's not a metropolis on the scale of London or Paris, so it doesn't have an equivalent of, say, Harrods. But what it does have is an independent and vibrant sense of style, and hundreds of great shops to prove it. There's Hoofstraat, also known as the 5th Ave of Amsterdam, which has literally hundreds of high quality clothes shops in it, then there's the more conventional department stores in the centre of town. One of the best places I've been clothes-wise is Look Out, which sells the kind of decent designer gear that's for real people - Paul Smith, Stone Island etc.

Amsterdam also excels in its antique shops, I'm told, but beyond passing a few of these shops in the street, I've not got much experience of them, not being much of an antique freak. The markets in Amsterdam are uniformly excellent - as you'd expect from mainland western Europe, with special emphasis on typically Dutch specialities such as the flower market. Supermarkets aren't particularly varied in terms of operators, the main one being the Albert Heijn chain, which is reasonably cheap (if you're from the UK you'll find the price of beer in Dutch supermarkets to be agreeable), well stocked and has friendly staff who pretty much all seem to speak perfect English.

Another type of shop that I'm unfamiliar with (you'll just have to trust me on this) is the Coffee Shop. They are dotted around here and there, maybe with slightly more in the De Wallen area. But despite Amsterdam being well known for its liberalised laws in allowing coffee shops, you wouldn't notice them had you not been told of their existence.

All in all I'd rate Amsterdam extremely highly for its retail - it definitely has more to offer than most cities of comparable size elsewhere. Might need to get cheap ferry tickets - leaves all the more money to spend when when I get there...