Hot, Cold and Creamy

One of the perks of the job is that I get to travel abroad, which means that I get to see lots of little snippets of the world.  This week I'm in the Netherlands for a training course called "Hot, Cold and Creamy".  Although this title is dripping with innuendo, I assure you it was very innocent!

On one evening during the course, the hosts took us into Amsterdam and we got to have a little tour.  Unfortunately I didn't have space in my luggage to bring my digital SLR, but hopefully the camera on my phone will do the city justice.

Keeping in theme with the title of the course, our hosts first took us into an ice cream parlour/chocolatier, where they roasted their own chocolate and made their ice creams from scratch.

They had every variety of ice cream you could imagine and all were amazingly tasty.  My favourite was the Cinnamon flavour.  But then again I am addicted to this spice.

They even had chocolate in all kinds of formats; spreadable, dipping, standard bars, powder for drinking and snorting with rolled up money!  We were definitely in the party capital.

We then made our way to the canal where we were to start our boat trip.  To get there we had to walk through the red light district.  Some could say this was the "hot" part of the trip!

I was quite surprised at how blatant and in your face it was.  Buildings had floor to ceiling windows with women behind them of all shapes and sizes flaunting their assets, trying to get punters.  There was even one lady who looked like she could have been a school teacher and looked very out of place next to all the other women that were quite heavily done up.

The whole thing is very hard to imagine if you have never been before.  One of the girls in the group tried to take a picture of them, which had them banging on the windows and shaking their fingers at her.

The boat trip was an amazing way to see Amsterdam and I recommend it to anyone.  The canal tunnels had lights on them which looked beautiful under the dark sky.  The houses that lined the canal were huge and had high ceilings ornately decorated with chandeliers.  No doubt living by the canal is expensive business.