Abroad is foreign – oh no it isn’t (but this was unique - yes, the only one of its kind!)

A friend sent through a list put together by staff of a travel company of complaints they have received such as “We went on holiday to Spain and had a problem with the taxi drivers as they were all Spanish” and "On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don't like spicy food."

The list is long and quite funny but having just come back from a European city my feeling was that all big city centres now look the same.  Within ten minutes walk from our hotel there were the following, McDonalds, Burger King, Waterstones, Accessorize, Karen Millen, Starbucks, Lush, Body Shop, Superdry, Abercrombie and Fitch, H&M, Timberland, Subway, Ben & Jerry – the list goes on and, no, I wasn’t in London’s Oxford Street nor in the USA – I was in Amsterdam.

We haven’t visited Amsterdam for probably 25 years and the change was dramatic. We had two reasons for visiting now – the first was to visit the refurbished Rijksmuseum, which was sensational. The second was to go to Keukenhof to see the tulips – I have never been and although have no interest in gardening but do like flowers, I thought this was something I should see.  I  thought all tulips looked like the ones you see in supermarkets - tulip shaped….  nothing can describe the variety of shapes and of course the colours were amazing.  My expectation was that I would see this

 but in fact most of the display is in wonderful landscaped gardens more like this

and here is just a small sample.

                            

 

We ordered bulbs for delivery in the Autumn to plant and bring back a few memories – go early in the day before the crowds arrive.

PS I know this isn't properly formatted but life is too short to fiddle around with it any more.