Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Travelin' Tuesday - Amsterdam, The Netherlands


After London, we took a train to the east side of the country where we caught a ferry over to Amsterdam. The architecture here is beautiful! This is a picture taken right when we arrived, by the train station. (Please excuse the construction)



Amsterdam is a really neat place & the layout is very different from a lot of the other countries that we visited. On the picture of the map below you can see that everything is divided by canals! 


It's really pretty, but you can tell by the picture of Sebastien with this HUGE map that we got lost a LOT. But really, what else it new??


Here’s me by a statute on one of the many canals – you can see how pretty all the buildings are lining the canals. They all have so much personality!



Below is a picture of the main strip & the main square. While we were there, they had put out a bunch of sand and were holding a soccer tournament! We watched for a little bit while listening to the different street performers – so fun!



Amsterdam has a very different culture than what we were used to, but we enjoyed it a lot! The big park is called Vondel Park. It was a lot of fun to people watch in, & I loved watching the business people riding to work on their old school bikes!





Fun things to do: While we were walking around & exploring the city, I had to stop at the cute Dutch shoes – of course J Amsterdam also has great museums that are not to be missed: the Van Gogh Museum & the Anne Frankhais (Anne Frank House).


The first hostel we stayed in was kind of far away from the city, but Sebastien had stayed there before & wanted to go again. It is called Lucky Lake. It’s a series of RVs set up together with a kitchen & bathroom area in the middle. There was a grocery pretty close by & the hostel had bikes for us to use for free! We just rode to the grocery, packed some food on the back, & made ourselves some din din. The kitchen was great because it had everything we needed & was the main social place for everyone. We met some really nice people there, but honestly I wouldn’t recommend staying at this hostel again because of the location to the city.



For the second half of our stay in Amsterdam (2 days) we stayed at 2Rooms. It’s a house where the owners have opened up – duh – 2 Rooms for travelers to rent out! It was very clean, & I liked that we only had to share the bathroom with 2 other people. It was pretty expensive for our student budget though.



**Amsterdam Travel Tip: Try and learn the language! I had so much fun trying to pronounce some of the words – check out how long this word for ticket machine is!!



Happy Travels!

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