The reasons I would return to Amsterdam in The Netherlands are varied. To sum it up, it was a matter of love at first sight the first time I visited the city with my wife, and she feels exactly the same way. We made our first trip from our home country, the U.S.A, during Christmas week in 2004. It was sort of a spur-of-the-moment trip-planning thing, since we had not even thought about anything like that until about two months prior. We happened to watch a travel show on television about Amsterdam, and were both struck by how beautiful the city seemed to be, and that as far as European locations in general go, The Netherlands was a country friendly to Americans and with most of the native population speaking some if not fluent English. That was no small consideration for us due to the political climate in the U.S. at the time and how a lot of the rest of the world viewed our country, in addition to my wife never having travelled outside the U.S. and with me having done so only once on a business trip to Germany. To say we both had concerns about getting on ...