Amsterdam

I am back from Amsterdam now, writing from the lobby of the hotel.  Unfortunately my ethernet is messed up and no one knows how to fix it, but at least the wireless is working!  I am pretty exhausted from Amsterdam!  We took a train (which was a very slow train, the cars on the highways were going faster than us at some points!) and arrived in Amsterdam around 4 pm.  We made our way over to our hostel ,which is a story in itself, and left our bags in our room.  We had a room with 3 sets of bunk beds and there were 5 of us so we all fit...barely!  The room was so tiny!  We were all starving so we found a sports bar and went to have a bite to eat.  You will never guess what was playing on one of the tvs...The Atlanta Braves!  (They were losing 5-0 though...) but I was so excited!  I took a picture:)  People in Amsterdam speak much better English than in Brussels so it was really easy to understand everyone.  It was FREEZING this weekend so we got some coffee and headed towards the Red District.  That is quite an attraction down there.  We stayed long enough to tour the street and say we had been there and then we left.  We headed back to the hostel to get some sleep for our busy following day and found a new person sleeping in our extra bed...what a surprise that was!  It was definitely part of the "hostel" experience I won't forget.  Sleeping with a stranger next to you was very nerve-racking, but he was up and gone at 7:30.  

Janet and I started our day around 9:30.  We got up and realized it was pouring down rain and neither of us had brought anything heavier than a sweater!  We put on as many layers as we could and set out for some breakfast.  We found this really cute bakery called Sanday's and I got a koffie croissant and a chocolate muffin.  They were DELICIOUS!  (We got breakfast there on Sunday as well!)  The guys eventually got up and we headed to the Anne Frank house.  This was my favorite part of the whole weekend.  I don't have any pictures because we weren't allowed to take any but I brought the brochure home and my souvenir from Amsterdam was a book about Anne Frank's last days in the concentration camp.  The house was amazing.  There was no furniture in it because when the nazis raided the house they took all the furniture with them and Otto Frank wanted to keep the house like it had been after they left.  We saw the actual bookcase that hid the Annex and were able to walk around up there!  They had lots of artifacts that Miep (Mr. Frank's sectretary) managed to save after the raid.  There were some of the study books the kids used and a recipe book.  I think my favorite part of the house were the letters on display that Otto Frank wrote to Miep after he had learned about the loss of his entire family.  They were so heartfelt and really touched you.  The only bad part was that Anne's real diary wasn't on display because of weather-related reasons.  It was still such an amazing house and I'm so glad I was able to actually visit a place I had read about since I was a little girl!

Our next stop was the Van Gogh Museum.  The museum only held 200 of the 900 known paintings by Van Gogh, but that was more than enough paintings to look at.  I liked reading about his life from the brochures and some of the excerpts on the plaques by the paintings had interesting stories, but I personally thought they all looked really similar.  At times during his life his style of painting would change and you could easily see a difference, but they all ultimately looked the same.  Interesting nonetheless:)  After we left the Van Gogh museum we found a cute little restaurant and got pancakes...mine, of course, was covered in chocolate:)  The pancakes were REALLY filling and we decided to skip dinner and go to a comedy show!  The comedy show was called, "Is It Rape If the Tree Doesn't Want to Be Hugged?"  It was a comedy show about how to help the environment by going green so i thoroughly enjoyed it:)  It was funny and I'm glad that people in other countries are trying to do something to help the environment.  (They even made some cracks on Americans, George Bush, and Al Gore...all of which were completely true!! It was so funny!)  It was late by the time we got out and just decided to head back to the hostel.  We ended up waking our roomie up and he was really very nice.  He was german and he said, "you are americans aren't you?"  and we said, "yes"  and he said, "I thought so, I can't tell what part you are from, but I studied English linguistics!"  We thought that was really funny...and we were partly glad that he couldn't tell we were from the South!  

We all woke up around 6 am to some guy in the room next to us snoring like there's no tomorrow and eventually all got up at 9:30 because we couldn't get any sleep:)  We packed, got breakfast, and headed for the train station.  We got back in Brussels around 2, showered, and I have since been trying to get my ethernet to work since then, but to no avail.  Unless I can get it fixed tomorrow, it looks like I'll be writing from the lobby for the rest of my trip:)  I'm about to add pictures so I hope you enjoy them!  By the way, the buildings in Amsterdam were absolutely beautiful, even in the rain:)