Amsterdam

My roommate Marissa and I spent this past weekend in Amsterdam! We left very early Friday morning and returned Sunday night.  We stayed in a house boat hostel, which was awesome! It was very small and the bathrooms didn't smell great but it was a fun experience! Since houseboats are a big thing in Amsterdam, a city full of canals, it was a good way to get the feel of the city!

Friday we took a free walking tour around Amsterdam, which was great! This company has tours in cities all over Europe, and tells the visitors a lot of details about the city and landmarks around it.  We learned all about how Amsterdam was founded, the history behind it and its liberal policies and what the future looks like for the city.  It was also a great way to meet people from other countries, since there were folks from Australia, Spain and Portugal, as well as some students from New York! The tour ended at a restaurant that had cheap stampot, a Dutch dish consisting of a sausage, mashed potatoes mixed with cabbage and gravy, so we had an early dinner and heard about all these different people's travels.  It was great and gave us a chance to speak with people we wouldn't have met otherwise.  

After the tour and dinner, we walked to the Anne Frank House museum with the other students from New York.  The museum was really nice, and obviously very emotional and I was very glad to have visited.  It was very simple, as Otto Frank did not want there to be furniture in the rooms they had lived in, but just to see how small a space so many people lived in for so long was very moving.  The quotes from Anne's diary also made the experience more real and touching.


On Saturday we set out early into a sleepy Amsterdam and made our way to the Rijksmuseum.  It was a nice musuem but smaller than I had expected.  There were lots of great paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer and other Dutch painters.  After that we walked to the van Gogh Musuem, right down the street.  I was very excited to go, since my favorite van Gogh is in the Amsterdam museum.  I was slightly disappointed, since the museum, though it consists of four floors, only has one floor of van Gogh.  The others house works that served as van Gogh's influences and also works that were influenced by him.  It was interesting and important to see where his art work came from and how it impacted future artists but I wanted some more Vincent! The works that they did have were fantastic though, including some very unusual early works and some of his most famous later works.  Wheatfield with Crows, my absolute favorite, was even more gorgeous and emotional in real life, and I was so glad to be able to stand in front of it.  


Saturday evening we wandered around, found the tulip market (which was beautiful) and got some dinner.  Then we went on another tour, through the same company, that went through the Red Light District.  Marissa and I were glad to go with a group, since we were a little wary to walk through the district alone at night.  The tour was with the same guide and he told us the history of the district and how everything works, which really enhanced the tour.  


Sunday we spent the remainder of our trip wandering around the city.  We did some shopping and found some great buildings and streets and got to know Amsterdam a little more.  It was a great weekend! 


I'm now in my second to last week of class before the internship phase and so am busy writing papers and presentations! It is weird to be in that stage of the "semester" already, since we literally just started!