I’ve now been told by two different people that I’ve got Amsterdam all wrong, and am basing my opinion the sleezy bit – which I guess is a fair enough comment. If I’d arrived in London for the first time on a wet February afternoon and spent an hour walking around either Kings Cross or Soho I wouldn’t have many positive comments to make.
Anyway, if I’d got around to implementing comments, the one below from handee2001 would have appeared (instead of which it arrived by e-mail):
Give it a second go it you can. The area directly around the station< is, granted, a bit grim. Of particular interest might be the church in a terraced house "Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder" ("Our lord in the attic"), and the Beguinhof, for a bit of religious history. The Amsterdam historical museum is areal treasure, and further out the canals get beautiful. And the art isn't bad, either. But yeah, the bit around Centraal station is grim. You've really got to move far enough away from that to get away from the day-tripping british stoner boys busy turning themselves green, and the american tourists
I got as far as designing the database schema for my comments system, and a skeleton AJAX implementation to do a funky show/hide comments what-not, but then lost enthusiasm because I thought the only people that would leave comments would be spammers!