My preferred activity for New Year’s Eve is to stay at home and go to bed early. This year though, I ventured out, all the way to the party city - Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is a great city and I love it. It’s a very young city, with people obviously heading there to have a good time and party. New Year’s is no exception and I’m sure many people went to Amsterdam especially to celebrate the new year.

We headed to Dam Square at around 11pm and found it was much quieter than expected. I had heard there are a few different places to go to see the fireworks but there was little going on in Dam Square, that’s for sure. A few people were setting off small fireworks but apart from some guy almost blowing his head off with a mis-fired firework, there wasn’t much entertainment.

We decided we may as well go back to the hotel but on the way stopped off at Rembrandt Square. Much more was going on there with a live band, a lot more people, and a lot more crazy fireworks.

Without a doubt, I have never experience a New Year’s Eve like this one. In Australia, most people go to see the fireworks put on by the local government, not set off their own fireworks. In fact, I think in most states fireworks are illegal. So seeing people set off thousands of fireworks and firecrackers in the street and in crowded squares was crazy and scary (for me)! I even saw many parents giving fireworks to their kids to play with!

Along with the guy who had the firework go off in his face, lol, I also saw one guy get hit in the backside with a stray firework, lol again.

At midnight, I’m not sure if there were official fireworks or not seeing as the fireworks were going off all over the place I couldn’t tell what was going on. The constant explosions and smoke made the city look and sound like a war zone. I’ve never seen anything like it.

We got a taxi back to the hotel not long after midnight, driven by a taxi driver who went through 3 red lights, cutting off countless other cars, and narrowly avoiding drunk pedestrians. We made it back to the hotel in one piece, barely.