We arrived in Amsterdam around midnight Friday July 10th. When we walked out of the train station I was amazed with what I saw. There were people everywhere and the very distinct smell of marijuana. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. Matt, Elyzabeth, Kaitlyn, and I were rooming together for the weekend in Amsterdam. The bad part about arriving in the middle of the night in a strange new city is that we had no idea how to get to our hotel. Let alone the fact that this was our first weekend in Europe on our own and none of us were use to taking buses and trams anywhere. The hotel had given us the bus number for the bus that we could take to the hotel but our bus never came. So we waited and waited and finally figured out that maybe the buses weren’t running this late at night so we settled on taking a tram. Now the trick was figuring out which tram to take. We wondered around until we finally found a map and we looked up where our hotel was and found the tram we needed to take. When we finally arrived at our hotel about 30 minutes later we were all exhausted and pretty proud of ourselves for figuring our way around a new city on our own.
Saturday morning we all woke up and met the other groups downtown by the train station. First thing we did was go on a canal cruise. The canals were beautiful. They explained on our tour that there are approximately 2,500 houseboats that line the canals of Amsterdam. The tour guide also said that the government has put restrictions on the number of house boats so that no more may be brought into the canals. Nowadays if you want to live on a houseboat in Amsterdam, that is if you can afford it, you either have to wait for someone to move or sell theirs. After the canal tour a few other students and I had lunch at a bakery downtown and then walked around and shopped for awhile. Saturday afternoon we all took a nap in the huge park by the Van Gogh Museum. We definitely do not have grass in Texas like they did in this park. It was so soft and green. Once we were all done napping and decided to get our butts up we took a tour of the Anne Frank House. By the time we were done with the Anne Frank House it was about 7:00 p.m. and we were all getting pretty hungry. We made our way to a little pancake house for dinner. I ordered a strawberry and whipped cream waffle. It was possibly the best waffle I have ever had!
Sunday morning everyone woke up and met downtown again. Our first stop of the day was the Van Gogh Museum. We tried doing the Van Gogh Museum on Saturday but we ran out of time. I really enjoyed walking around the museum. I spent about two hours walking around and looking at all the beautiful art work. After the museum we all walked around downtown again and shopped until it was time for us to take our train back to Bonn. Overall I have to say that Amsterdam was a very pretty city and different from anywhere I have ever been before. I really liked all of the canals and the houseboats lining the canals. Amsterdam was not my favorite city that I visited on the trip though. I really did not like walking around and having to constantly smell the lingering scent of marijuana. I also did not like all of the advertisements and stores related to sex or the smell of urine that was very apparent in parts of the city. I am glad that I was able to spend one of my free weekends in Amsterdam and experience the city but I do not foresee myself returning there in the future.
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