We drove about 4.5 hours to Amsterdam, Netherlands and stayed at Conscious Museum Square Hotel, located just minutes from the Van Gogh Museum.
Interior decorating idea- bring nature to your bedroom!
Amsterdam is a city built upon pilings and actually has more canals than Venice! This one-of-a-kind city felt clean and safe. Bikes seem to be the dominant form of transportation within the city (see the picture of bikers below in front of the Heineken Brewery) and people can be seen (or smelled) smoking marijuana perched outside of beautiful, brick, canal-side buildings while moms and dads walk or bike their young kids home from school. In fact, young babies sometimes sit in special seats between their parents and the handle bars and kids ride in seats on the back (like we're used to in the states), holding on to their parents' shoulders with their feet on specially placed pegs, or in delivery-like carts in front of the bikes. Few if any kids or adults we saw were wearing helmets.
Bike Mania
We started our tour of Amsterdam by walking through the Red Light District, one of Amsterdam's oldest neighborhoods. Although prostitution is legal here (since the year 1200), this area looked like any other neighborhood, with shops and signage advertising adult products providing the only hint that something was different. Granted, we purposely walked through during daylight hours, and would have likely had a different experience late at night.
Near the Red Light District was the Oude Kerk (Old Church)
Canals Galore
Next, we visited the Anne Frank House, where Anne, her parents and sister, as well as four other people spent more than two years in hiding. A brief history review: Anne and the rest of the Frank family lived in Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933, but fled to the Netherlands where they lived, worked, and attended school. When the German army occupied the Netherlands in 1940, the Frank family went into hiding in an annex at the back of Otto Frank's office building concealed by a movable bookcase. The office personnel brought food and supplies to the people in hiding, but eventually the family was betrayed and their hiding spot was revealed. They were arrested by Nazis in 1944 and sent to concentration camps in Poland and Germany. Only Anne's father, Otto, survived. Anne's diary was found by an office worker after the arrest and returned to Otto upon his return to Amsterdam after the liberation of Auschwitz. Anne's diary was published in 1947 and the house where they hid was opened to the public as a museum in 1960. We weren't able to take pictures inside, but you can take a virtual tour of the annex here.
Anne Frank Huis
For lunch we had really great sandwiches (one tuna melt and one goat cheese, honey, and roasted red pepper on ciabatta bread) at Rick Rec, Restaurant Kapitein Zeppos, tucked in this little alley.
That afternoon, we walked through Vondel Park...
On our second day, we visited the Van Gogh Museum. Unfortunately, several floors were being renovated, but we were still able to see some really famous and beautiful paintings. Here are a few of our favorites:
Almond Blossom (1890) ,Van Gogh
Landscape at Twilight (1890), Van Gogh
Sunflowers (1888), Van Gogh
We also thought about visiting the Amsterdam Hermitage Museum, which contains art loaned from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. But after realizing that we had actually seen some of the main pieces in St. Petersburg, we decided to pass on the museum and instead enjoy the scenery along the Amstel River.
This was a very pleasant trip and we were happy to have experienced Amsterdam before leaving Europe. On the way home, we stopped in Koln (or Cologne) to see the massive cathedral, which Kiley and I visited a couple of years ago.
