Amsterdam

Oh Amsterdam, where do I even begin?? WE LOVE IT HERE!! I kind of want to just leave the post at that but I’ll go into details I guess. Collin and I got to spend two full days in Amsterdam. We stayed at this beautiful AirBnb in Landsmeer which is just over the water in a little village. The woman who hosted us raised pigeons, lived right on the canal, had a beautiful garden in this amazing location. The little city almost reminded me of the British tv shows I watch. Unfortunately we didn’t know that it costs 12€ for us one way each time!! And all together Amsterdam is very expensive so we’ve tried not to go overboard on things considering we still have 3 weeks to go. The first day we walked over 13 miles all together doing our own little walking “tour.” Which resulted in taking so many different alleys ways that neither of us could get enough of. It seemed like everywhere we looked I just wanted to take more and more pictures. Collin finally started making fun of me when we went over all the bridges because I HAD to take a picture almost every time. 😂 IT’S ALL SO GORGEOUS I CAN’T NOT TAKE A PICTURE!! I think it can’t get any prettier then we turn a corner and BAM 💥 another breath taking view. In our little walking excursion yesterday we saw all the sites plus some. I had found a walking tour guide on Pinterest and we basically followed that around. We started in the direction of the Ann Frank house which sadly all the tickets were sold out, guess it just means we have to come back 😉  from there we wandered through the Jordaan “district” of Amsterdam. We saw the Protestant cathedral which also acted as a cemetery. People are literally buried underneath the pews. Rembrandt apparently would love to go to that church and had one if not more of his children christened there. And his wife is also buried in the floor.  We also loved Vondelpark. One of the signs in the park stated that it’s the most visited park in all the Netherlands and 1 in 10 native Netherland people visit it at least once a year. We loved it so much we went back on the second day and walked the whole park. They had this fun little jungle ropes course thing that Collin and I ran through with all the little kids.  We of course visited the I Amsterdam sign. What people fail to realize is that it takes a lot of effort to get a good picture in front of that thing. There are 10000 other people trying to get a good picture and it’s hard to fit the whole sign in the frame. We tried our best. 😂 I ate a stroopwafel the size of my face. And today we had Dutch fries which were amazing! And of course we had a Belgium waffle because they are everywhere here. 

Obviously we visited the red light district. I had heard things about this area and expected a lot of crazy. We definitely saw some crazy.  

Let’s go back to the AirBnb for a second. So we loved our time there. It was completely magical. HOWEVER, last night was a bit of a night. The first night we stayed there we took a melatonin and we slept for forever. So, thinking that the next night would be a bit easier on the jet lag we decided not to take one. After an hour or so of sleeping Collin and I both woke up to a little scurrying sound, which sounded like it was coming from one of our bags. Obviously I panic thinking mice were eating through all of our stuff. Collin got up and checked all of our stuff then an hour or so later I heard it again. Thankfully nothing was chewed through. We think/hope that whatever it was resided in the walls. 

Tonight we are taking an over night bus to Berlin. I’d love to come back to Amsterdam with a local or someone who frequently travels here because I know that we only grazed the surface of this beautiful city. For example, on our way to the bus station we went past a park that I had not heard of in all of my Amsterdam research, and there was a huge pavilion with live music and all this cool stuff! What else did we miss??!? 

I completely understand why so many artists are drawn here and have originated from Amsterdam. If I was any sort of artistic I’d be painting these streets too. 

This is the canal that bordered our AirBnb