We made it to Amsterdam and I am currently sitting under a tunnel through one of the museums because it is POURING rain. And not like straight down pouring where you can just hide under an umbrella... It's coming in sideways at like 100 miles an hour. So here I am sitting under a tunnel. Also the dog next to me keeps trying to smell my feet.
Besides the weather not really being super ideal for doing touristy summery things, Amsterdam is pretty cool. I'm not sure if I'll ever come back though. Maybe I will but it's a very large crazy city that sits under a perpetual cloud of weed and makes lots of money off of women standing in windows with barely any clothes on so its not really my kind of place. I will say that everyone we've met here has been super nice to us so that's a positive. And the canals are really very pretty and such an amazing thing to see when you come from a place like West Texas where there is hardly any water anywhere.
People watching here is really fascinating and it's just interesting to see the culture because Texas is a very conservative place and even after being in Amsterdam for less than 24 hours we've seen and been invited to gay pride events and walked by cafes making pot brownies and gone by super long lines of people waiting to get into museums to stare at art for five hours. It's hard for me to understand because I don't know very much about art and am not very cultured outside of what I know about America so it's a really big eye opener to realize how much I don't know and how much I may never know.
Several hours later.....
And now the weather is even worse... We're talking torrential downpour and crazy crazy windy. Umbrellas are literally snapping in half and huge trees have been uprooted and are laying across the middle of streets or on top of cars they've smashed beneath them. It just now kind of started to slow down but there's a lot of damage all over the city and broken umbrellas are laying all over the streets and stuffed into trashcans that are already overflowing with dead umbrellas.
We sat inside and ate a nice lunch to wait out some of the bad part of the storm. Then Alyssa, Callie and I made our way to the Anne Frank House. After finally arriving there completely drenched through our rain jackets, we waited in the line (which was not that long thanks to the terrible weather) and took pictures of the fallen trees and umbrella graveyard around us.
The Anne Frank house was AMAZING. Totally worth going to Amsterdam just to be in it. I remember reading her diary a couple times when I was younger and to actually see her diary, the real one, right in front of my eyes, was incredibly moving. It was really emotional to realize that this young girl had to live this hidden life for two years and even after everything she went through to try and survive she didn't make it. There was an exhibit at the end that I especially liked though that pointed out that Anne Frank is no saint. She's no super special person. She's just a girl that was killed because she was Jewish. There's millions of people who were killed in the holocaust that will never have their own museum and I think it's really important to read the other names. The other people who aren't famous but died for the very same reason she did.
I really enjoyed my time in Amsterdam but I am super excited to be heading back to Bonn again even though it's just for a few days.
See you in Bonn!
"To build a future, you have to know the past." -Otto Frank
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