Teach Me How to Amsterdam

After our initial train from Norddeich Mole got cancelled, we finally headed off to Amsterdam! We ended up getting into Amsterdam at around midnight Friday. Our hostel was pretty nice except I didn’t have a bathroom in my actual room. The room with everyone else was much nicer! I was feeling pretty tired when we arrived and I didn’t really want to go out, until our whole group showed up at the bar at our hostel and peer pressured me to go out with them. We decided that we wanted to go see the Red Light District, so we headed out at around 1:30 and started to just wander towards that direction and asking random people the direction of the RLD. After a long time of wandering around, we finally made it to the RLD. There were two different take away feelings I had for the RLD, the first is that it was actually pretty interesting that there is something like this in the world and then on the other hand you realize how messed up the system is that girls are selling their bodies to make money. After looking around the area for a while, we headed back to the hostel. I didn’t make it back to the hostel until about 445 am, our group was then getting up at 7 am to go to the Anne Frank museum because the line to get in can be ridiculous. In essence, I was running on about 2 hours of sleep all day Saturday and I didn’t go to bed then until about late Saturday and early Sunday morning. We woke up early Saturday morning and made our way to probably the best museum I have been to. I knew that Anne Frank had made a diary and that her and her family had been hidden during the war but that was about as far as my knowledge of the situation went. Seeing the full story and reading some exerpts from her journal really opened up my eyes to how intense the whole situation was. After the Anne Frank museum we went to ear some traditional netherland tiny pancakes, and they were amazing! We then went to the Rijks museum where there is just a massive collection of art dating over I think a span of 800 years. We stayed there for about 3 hours and I’m not entirely sure that I saw everything because of how large the museum was but I did see 3 hours’ worth of great art! Our group then went to the park next to our hostel to just relax and take a nap because of our long day the day before. We then went and had dinner at a fantastic Italian restaurant in the center of Amsterdam, where there were workers outside of the restaurants really pushing you to go inside. Dinner was fantastic and then we went back to our hostels to take a short nap before we went out on the town again. A few of us then went to an Ice Bar, which is basically a bar in a real big freezer. It was fine to go see it once but that is probably the only time I will need to go see one. Sunday morning we went to the Heineken brewery to buy some souvenirs, and then we headed back to Bonn after I left my camera in a café next to the brewery.