Amsterdam!!

Hello again! First off, sorry it’s been awhile since I last posted anything! My internet has been quite the fickle thing lately. I actually wrote the whole blog for Amsterdam last week, but when I tried posting it, the internet decided not to remember anything I did except the first couple pictures. So I’m writing my blogs in a word document first, and then I’ll copy and paste it into my blog. Hopefully that will help.

So! Two weekends ago now, I went to Amsterdam for the weekend!! I went with 2 girls from my program, Anna and Rachel. We took a train to and from Amsterdam, and I have to say that I like train travelling better. We arrived in Amsterdam around 9 or 10 Friday, March 23rd. After getting settled into our hostel, we wandered around a bit.

Saturday morning for breakfast I had apple strudel from a little boulangerie near our hostel, and then we went off to find the Anne Frank house.

After we walked through Anne Frank’s House, we stopped at a café for a little while. We decided we needed to get some Dutch chocolate after that, so we found a supermarket (with a green roof!) and bought a bar of chocolate there and ate it on the roof.

After our little morning break, we went over to the Van Gogh Museum! It was really cool! I realized I actually didn’t know that much about him before going, but now I do! I’m pretty sure you weren’t supposed to take pictures because I didn’t see anyone taking any, but there were a couple I couldn’t resist: 

After the museum, we had to take pictures by Amsterdam’s slogan, “I amsterdam”

We found a cute café/bar that had a patio on a canal and ate there for lunch. It was really nice to just sit and chill without worrying about anything.

After lunch, it was time to go to the Heineken Brewery!

At the end of the tour, there was a room that was basically a bar where we got 2 free Heineken!

We ended up staying in the brewery longer than we anticipated, but we didn’t realize this until after we stopped to by poffertjes (kind of like fat baby pancakes with powdered sugar and butter, yum!) so I had to inhale these (picture below) while we ran across town to get to our cocktail cruise on the canals.

We made it in time for our cruise!

Sunday:

I finally found tulips finally in a little flower bed across the street from our hostel!

Sunday morning we walked through the flower market for a while. I found yellow irises for my garden! But they were a little expensive and I don’t know how long they would keep… plus I had run out of cash money at that point, so I didn’t get them. But now I know they exist! Then we had lunch/ brunch at a little restaurant we found; I had poffertjes again! This time with ice cream too!

Afterwards, we wandered around Amsterdam a bit, and we found out that apparently Occupy Amsterdam was going on that weekend! There were lots of people dressed in funny outfits trying to get their pictures taken with people. They reminded me of really bad Carnival costumes. 

So apparently time just thought it would be fun to mess with us that weekend. So apparently in Europe Daylight savings time was that weekend, so Saturday night when we went to bed we had to set our clocks forward. I would blame that, but time was weird all weekend really. We actually almost missed our train back to Paris. I really don’t know where the time went. One minute we had an hour before, the next minute we were literally running across Amsterdam through crowds of people to get to the train on time. We made it thank goodness, but if that was a plane, we wouldn’t have been even close. I think I’ve decided I like trains better J

Thanks for holding the train Amsterdam!