I’d heard people talk about the canals - plural - of Amsterdam, but had for some reason always imagined it to be like Ottawa, with one single canal running through the centre. What I never realized about Amsterdam was just how many canals there are. This is the best I could get after editing For some reason, we decided to ignore the bird crap for a while and continue our exploration, which allowed me to take several more underexposed canal and street scene photos. Not wanting to be obvious about the bird crap, I took a few more photos and then walked over and had Geoff confirm my suspicions. I stopped to take a picture, and was promptly crapped on by a passing bird. Not pictured: Geoff, who was cracking up at my crappinessįrom there we took a left and walked toward Amsterdam’s famous canals. At least I think it was Dam Square, I really have no idea. We reached Amsterdam Centraal and followed the throngs of people south to Dam Square. Once we cleared immigration and customs, we stored our superfluous items in a locker and set out, still bright eyed with the excitement that comes with exploring a new place, and unaware of the fogginess and ineptitude that would hit our tired brains an hour later.Īmsterdam city centre is about a 20 minute train ride from Schipole, and you can buy your tickets before or after clearing customs - if you do it before, press the “more options” button, or it will force you into a first class ticket, which isn’t unaffordable at 7 Euros, but is unnecessary for a 15 minute train ride. Our bags were checked through all the way through to Tallinn, but we wanted to ditch some of our carry-on items, not seeing much reason to carry around our inflatable pillows and the latest edition of Real Simple magazine. The city is set-up for layovers, so theoretically a layover in Amsterdam shouldn’t be a problem. Having never been to the city, we jumped at the chance to spend a layover in Amsterdam, not really considering we’d be coming off a 9-hour trans-Contilantic (trans-contilantic = trans-continental + trans-Atlantic), compounded by a nine hour time difference.

This was a bad call, and not something you should do. We stopped in Amsterdam on our recent trip to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania by timing our flights to have a 10-hour layover.

The layover amsterdam