Morning walk on the last day.

I went for a long walk this morning. On purpose this time. It's easy to make your walks overly long in Amsterdam. The whole concentric semicircle thing makes it all very confusing to plan routes. I wanted to talk over to the old Portuguese Synagogue. We've been there before, but it's pretty spectacular.

The shortest route over there was straight and I knew from experience that it was kind of crowded and unattractive, so I went for the innermost canal and minimized first my circumference and then my time spent walking straight. I walked through the so-called flower market, which had lots and lots and lots of bulbs, but no flowers to speak of. All the way I'm dodging bikes and cars and scooters. But not trams. Nobody screws with the trams; they are the badasses of public transit and to be honest, everyone not on them is terrified of them. They are huge and go fast and of course can't stop very quickly. Nearly saw someone trying to get a stroller across the tracks get stuck and nailed yesterday.

I took some videos while I was walking here's a couple

So you get the idea. Amsterdam is impossible and marvelous at the same time. On the live here/not live here scale I would put it solidly in the live here column, but with some reservations.

Speaking of which, let me describe the hotel to you a bit, now that we've left it. Excellent location. It's a partial block of canal houses all connected, so you go up and down stairs to get from one part to the other. Our room faces the canal and it's beautiful, and the bed is among the most comfortable we've ever encountered. The downside is that the room and the bathroom are both small, and there wasn't enough room to put all of our clothing. It worked out okay, because I'm okay using my suitcase as a drawer. The staff is uniformly great.

I'll post a full review on TripAdvisor. I'd say we really liked it but didn't absolutely love it. Four stars out of five.