There's no excuse for not going to Amsterdam. It took me less time to fly to Schiphol - the airport that serves the Dutch capital - than the coach journey from Oxford to Heathrow.

Once I arrived it was a 15-minute train ride to Central Station and before I could say 'hurdy-gurdy' I was in the heart of the city.

A beautiful place full of beautiful people who are generally all super tall.

There really must be something in the Edam because I felt like Gulliver arriving in the land of the giants.

Still, while the people may be big, the buildings aren't. The 13th century city was established by ramming thousands of wooden blocks into the underlying unstable marshland.

As a result of this precarious foundation very few houses are more than four storeys high and the city only sits seven feet above sea level.

On the other hand, being as flat as a Dutch pancake makes it an ideal place for cycling and in a city of 735,500 residents, six out of every seven own a bike.

Unlike Oxford, however, very few own a car.

From a noise and pollution point of view it's fantastic; I loved being able to stroll along the quiet streets soaking in the atmosphere.

But from an Englishman-in-a-foreign point of view, you've got to keep your wits about you - traversing the road generally involves crossing six lanes of traffic, comprising two cycle lanes, two car lanes and two tram lanes.

There's no doubt they love their bicycles, and I loved them for loving their bicycles, but it was a bit strange to discover that all the bikes (without exception) bore a remarkable resemblance to two-wheelers used by postmen in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1950s (the type you see on Heartbeat).

Fortunately in the city centre I was saved from my 'road crossing nightmare' because many of the main streets are pedestrianised.

Stepping away from the scores of trendy designer shops which line the main strip took me to Pisengracht where Anne Frank spent more than two years hiding from the Nazis in a secret annexe with her family and another family.

The diary she kept throughout the time she spent in this cramped building has been translated into more than 40 different languages, and walking through the rooms where she spent so long in isolation was a powerful experience.

Amsterdam is awash with art museums and while I am not generally a big fan of such things (no appreciation), I thought I ought to go to one of them.

So for no particular reason other than I knew he'd gone mad and thought that that might be entertaining to find out about, I opted for the Van Gogh museum as opposed to the Rembrandt.

I wish I could report back that this Neanderthal rugby player had been shown the light, but sadly not.

Apparently, Van Gogh's genius is all to do with tone and colour and shade or something, but I still can't see what all the fuss is about.

What makes that Sunflowers picture a masterpiece worth millions of pounds?

I also felt a little let down when I discovered that far from chopping the whole of his ear off, he'd actually only sliced off a small part of his lobe.

Surely that's only borderline madness? What a fraud.

Dutch people all speak superb English and they seem to have a sixth sense for knowing you are not a native before they even speak to you.

Most menus are in both English and Dutch and when I took a boat cruise along the many canals which criss-cross the city, the commentary was in English first and, bizarrely, Spanish second, without a trace of Dutch.

There are 1,250 bridges straddling Amsterdam's canals and in keeping with the clean living city, the waterways' 14 locks are dredged every night to ensure they are pollution free.

Cruising along the canals is a nice and pretty cheap way to see the city from another viewpoint (and a surprisingly good way of nursing a hangover without feeling guilty about wasting a day).

For light refreshment the Heineken Brewery tour sounded good, but in reality it was a bit of an odd one.

Yes you get a few free bevvies and a special surprise gift of a bottle opener (ooooh!), but you also go on two of the most bizarre rides I have ever experienced.

Whoever designed them was definitely half-cut on Heineken at the time. The first involved standing up, leaning on a railing in a small theatre.

On the screen in front of me appeared a stack of Heineken bottles on a conveyor belt and it soon emerged that I was a Heineken bottle myself.

Indeed, the ground started shaking as I was pushed along the conveyor belt.

Give or take a few bigger thuds here and there, this was it for the next five minutes...

The next ride was a slightly different take on the same shake.

This time however, I was in a cart behind a team of horses travelling through the streets of Amsterdam.

Nightlife in Amsterdam is good. There are dozens of restaurants, funky bars and clubs in the city and both beer and food are spot-on.

The main Dutch beers are Heineken or Amstel and the bier blonde (a light-tasting and refreshing lager into which you squeeze a lime) is really good.

Dutch dishes include mashed potato-based stuff, sauerkraut and things like meat roulade.

It might not sound fantastic on paper, but it was absolutely lovely and all priced very reasonably.

Overall, Amsterdam is a nice place, full of nice people... and enough tasty cheese to keep the world's mice population happy for a lifetime.