The former capital of the first in Europe bourgeois-democratic republic Netherlands brightly celebrates the Queen's birthday. Here people continue to be proud of their love of freedom.
The former capital of the first in Europe bourgeois-democratic republic Netherlands brightly celebrates the Queen's birthday. Here people continue to be proud of their love of freedom.
Amsterdam in Netherlands has many names as every great famous capital does. The most common one is "Venice of the North" or even "doubly Venice". We often can hear something like "a city on stilts" or "city on the herring bones. The Netherlands capital was called "New Babylon" and "Jerusalem of the West" and "big European shop”. Now more and more often it is called "the freest city in the world”. In fact, everything is quite simple and not very poetic. "Amsterdam" in the translation from Dutch means "the dam on the river Amstel”.
At the turn of the XIII-XIV centuries, Amsterdam has received town privileges - the right to build the city walls, the right to mint its own coins and the right to charge a fee for use of bridges and gateways - and in 1317 Count William III joined it to the county of Holland.
The city impresses first of all with its narrow but elegant buildings, which look like some weird home for fabulous creatures. All houses in Amsterdam Netherlands stand not on the ground, but on stilts of ten to twenty meters length, driven into the muddy shaky soil. Silt is not a very reliable footing, so many buildings start to "dance", leaning in different directions.
The Dutch's love to bicycles is known all over the world. "The Dutch are born with a bicycle" – people joke here.
Amsterdam and tulips are almost inseparable concepts. Craze, fanatical passion for tulips in Holland started in the XVII century, when the first flower was braught into Netherlands. And there is hemp in different variants next to tulips on the counters.
Amsterdam would not be itself without a museum of erotica, the museum of medieval torture and the museum of cannabis. This is a city where you are surrounded by so many exciting, unusual, fascinating and strange things, that finally you stop to be surprised with them.
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