Amsterdam

Amsterdam… oh Amsterdam… what an adventure and experience this weekend was! First of all Amsterdam is in the Netherlands so we had to take a Train From Trier to Luxembourg and then go to Brussels, Belgium, get off and get on the last train that took us to Amsterdam. So total we were in 4 different countries in the past 4 days!! Pretty cool!

We walked everywhere again this weekend, a ton of walking!!!

Amsterdam was not as exciting to me, or at least for the fact that we were there 4 days and only did enough stuff to fill 2 days. We were a little bored, or at least I was. The other girls like to go shopping and stuff, I don’t care for it and get bored really easy. But anyway the town is busy, mostly tourists, and very dirty!! But that seems to be the way it is in all the big touristy cities! The transportation and the streets/town layout were much different than any other city we have been to, you can see that from the map. Purple line indicates where all we walked and what we say. Yellow circle is where our Hostel was.

The hostel was ok, pretty cheap and right off the main street in town. The stairs to get to the room was ridiculous, pretty much a strait up climb, it was scary! We stayed in a big room with 10 people total, and most of the time there was equal amount of boys and girls. The bathroom still smelled and we did not shower the entire trip but at least we could pee and we had internet to use so it wasn’t too bad, it was a place to sleep anyway!

We ventured around once we got there and found a place for lunch, Fish and chips which were actually pretty good!! Then took off for the Museum we were most excited about! (it ended up to be my second favorite of the trip) The Van Gogh Museum. This dude was crazy and very talented in a weird and different way. He has always been one of my favorite artists, so it was pretty cool to actually get to see some of his work! I will tell you a bit about him because I know My parents don’t even know much about him at all, and to be honest I didn’t know too much about him either, I learned a lot!

In 1880 Vincent van Gough decided that he wanted to be an artist, he was only 27 at the time and had never done any art before but had worked for an art dealer. He was an active artist for only 10 years before he shot himself in the stomach and died a few days later. But in those 10 years, he produced about 800 paintings and over 1000 drawings that have all been preserved. He self-taught himself with a little bit of advice from artists friends in his later years and was pressured to create his own style. You can see his progress by looking at all of his work in the correct order, plus he had an illness that made him crazy and which ended up making himself commit suicide.

Anyway the Museum was really cool and we really liked it, spent quite a bit of time in there reading about all the different paintings and the artists who had influenced him. These are 4 of his most famous Pieces of art

We walked around a bit at night, stayed away from the real bad part of town, the Red light district. We did walk through there during the day since it was safer, and it was real disturbing! There are 3 kinds of buildings: Coffee shops, Sex shops, and strip clubs. Lots of barley dressed girls in windows all along the 4 or 5 blocks of the district. Other than this area of town, it wasn’t a bad place!

There are lots of canals since the Amstel River dominates the town which is then connected to the North Sea. And the transportation was different! They didn’t have a bus or metro system like we do here in Trier or in other city’s, they had the light rail trams, that were very scary because they were so quiet, we almost got hit a couple of times,. But really they didn’t scare me nearly as much as the bicyclist did! The down is dominated by bicycles, there are literally more of them then Cars. The Roads were very confusing to understand because of this. Most of the time there was a large area where the Train was to go, a small automobile lane, and 2 or more bicycle lanes, and then a small pedestrian lane to walk it. It was so scary, we all almost died multiple times by crazy Bikers!!!!

On Saturday we got up and went  to Anne Frank House, which was by far my favorite thing of the trip! I didn’t know very much, if anything about who she was or her family was and what they went through, but man I came out there knowing it all and it really makes you think! I bought one of the Diary books from the gift store and read the whole book on the way home I was so into it!

So for anyone else who didn’t know much about Anne Frank and her family you will now lean…. Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1929 and had a sister Margret, Mother Edith and Father Otto. They lived in Germany until 1933 when Hitler took over power the family moved to Amsterdam to live. Otto, Anne’s father owned his own business that made spices for meat and the gelling agent for jam. He rented out a building that housed his business and the back part was converted into the hiding place for the family when the time was needed.  May of 1940 was when the German Troops took over the Netherlands and on July 6, 1942 the Frank family was forced to go into Hiding. They hid in the back of his business but only 4 people knew they were hiding there so they had to be quite during the day so that their movements would not be noticed by the regular workers. There were a total of 8 people in this house hiding and they would stay here, not seeing daylight or anything until someone had ratted them out and the secret hideout was raided on August 4, 1944 and were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau Death camp where out of all 8 of them only Otto, the father survived the war. Anne had been keeping a diary for many many years and had gone into detail about everything that was happening and what all she felt about it all.

It’s all really sad, and I can’t imagine. The book I bought and read goes into a lot more detail about everything that happened! So when I get back to the states if anyone would like to borrow it to read they are more than welcome too! I highly recommend it!

After the Anna Frank house we walked west trying to find a windmill, we found it eventually and it was closed and pretty beaten up but that’s one of the things this country is known for. Windmills, Tulips, cows and cheese.

While we were walking around that night just trying not to be bored we stopped and watched some break dancers perform for like half an hour, they were really good and entertaining!

When we were trying to get back to our hostel, the main square we were by was packed and crowed with people, we could barely get through to get where we needed to go! It was a huge memorial and they were celebrating the end of WWII and their freedom, plus in memorial to all the people that were killed in the war.

On Sunday we got up and went to the botanical Gardens, one of the oldest Gardens in the world that has one of the largest varieties of plants and herbs in the world. We had a good time walking around and looking, took lots of pictures of flowers and butterfly’s J so girly

Then we walked up to the big river and looked around, here they had a few really cool ships and new crazy buildings, we walked around and looked then walked to a bigger windmill and down south of town and around, before we decided to call it a night early.

We got up and decided to catch an earlier train home, so we left about 12:30 instead of 4, and im so glad we did! I was so bored and ready to come back home! Trier is so beautiful, peaceful, and clean! Amsterdam was an experience, that’s for sure!!!!!