Brussels - What a 'Dam Day

Monday the 22nd, we day-tripped to Amsterdam, a 3 hour trip by train each way. From the train station we walked the main road towards the "Dam", where there was a church we looked into, but didn't feel like paying the admission fee to look around the exhibits, and instead, we popped into a cafe to plan the rest of our walking tour for the day. We ended up inside of a history of Amsterdam museum that was very well done and extremely informative. We could have spent the rest of the day there, but that was not our intention. From there, we walked the red light district, and toured a museum of marijuana. Although the red light district was not as scary as we both expected, both of us were slack-jawed at what we saw. There really are prostitutes behind large glass doors propositioning passers-by for business. There really are all kinds of live sex shows and sex toy stores. And they really do sell marijuana in the cafes. It was amazing, and we felt so awkward in the face of this strange reality. The city was easy to walk, and we covered alot of it very quickly. Unfortunately, the weather was really nasty, windy, and rainy, so it was difficult to persist late enough to catch the very latest train out, and we instead opted for the 7:23pm train back to Brussels.