I amsterdam

So for our last weekend adventure we headed to Amsterdam. Finally, visiting the Netherlands - the country that consisted of my number 2 and 3 choices for study abroad. Very glad I received Manchester though, the Dutch aren't very friendly. The city of Amsterdam, however, is beautiful.

Amsterdam is built up around endless canals. Between every row of houses and every street there's a canal to cross over. The number of them is outstanding and after a while you have no idea where you are in the city because every two steps there's a canal, which isn't a distinguishable landmark. Also there are bicycles everywhere. But we'll get back to this later on in the journey...

The canals:

My favorite part of the city is that the buildings actually lean forward. You can see the foundations of some them literally sticking out from the buildings next to it. It seems that the canals are eroding away the older buildings foundations. I keep imagining them all just toppling over eventually. 

Look at the darker brown building in this picture and how the foundation is sticking out:

Getting to Amsterdam, we had a 7am flight, which meant waking up at 4 in the morning. You know you wake up too early when you put your leggings on inside out and don't even realise it until you get to the airport... Good thing everyone else is comatose that early in the morning or else we'd be dealing with a major fashion faux pas. Even after napping on the plane, we were pretty beat arriving in the city.

The first laughable instance occurred when we saw the building most of the boys were staying in. Let's just say it was on the main road, above a late-night restaurant, with a man hanging out the window hollering to passersby. And let's now remember it's now 10am. We found out later the true joys of this hotel - the random hidden stairways with steps big enough for half of your foot and the shower right there in the room with the door broken. You can imagine my relief that we were staying somewhere else.

The first night we were there, we ventured into the infamous red-light district. I really just felt bad for all of these girls. Or apparently, they aren't always women, interestingly enough. And we never did find the secret hot girl row.

The next day we went to the van Gogh Museum which consists of famous van Gogh paintings and sketches, works by artists he was inspired by, and other works from the time period to compare/ contrast his techniques to others. van Gogh is my favorite painter, so I could've spent hours in this museum. My favorite was seeing one of his four Sunflowers paintings close up.

The one picture I was allowed to take in the van Gogh Museum:

On our way to this museum, we were distracted by a zip line in the middle of a park. Of course all six of us 20 something year olds had to partake in this 7 year old experience. If you sat on the zip line, your legs were bound to hit the ground within seconds. Standing was a little better at the 5 mph pace.

On the zip line:

Later that day, I ventured to my second brewery in 2 weeks - the Heineken Experience. I'm going to be a world-loving beer girl when I get home, don't know if the light beers in the States will cut it anymore. Heineken's secret ingredient is its "A" string of yeast. My favorite room had Heineken bottles hanging upside from the ceiling with 6 projection screens playing ads/music.

Inside the Heineken Experience:

The various Heineken labels throughout the years:

The 4 ingredients, including the secret "A" string of yeast on the far right:

Bottled ceiling: 

The next day we started off at the Anne Frank house. We went through the two stories which 8 of them lived in for 2 years. This tour put a new prospective on life. Being on exchange, you definitely forget how good you have things when you're traveling every weekend. Anne was a teenager who couldn't even experience sunlight or have friends her own age. Everything was small, cramp, and dark. The small efforts of decoration are preserved and show various photos from earlier on and rippings from magazines.

After this tour, we decided to experience Amsterdam in its true element - on bikes. When we went to the bike rental shop, I was already having mixed feelings, going between excited and nervous, since my normal instinct is to fall over when I'm about to run into something on a bike instead of just break... and then I heard there were no handle breaks. Ahhh what?! Apparently the popular bicycle type in Europe are the ones you pedal backwards to break. Okay, so now I'm not even confident that I can remember how to ride a bike let alone navigate this crazy city. But here goes nothing!

We rode to the I amsterdam letters and climbed on top to take the classic Amsterdam pictures. I made it up on the "a" before realising I had no idea how to get down. That was an entire other adventure.

I amsterdam letters:

We continued our bike journey set on finding this trail that would take us out to the countryside. Sounds nice enough. But then, why are we in the middle of the financial district? Of course, we're lost. But soon enough, after venturing under highways and through a field, we find the path. And we had a lovely bike ride down to the small town of Amstelveen where we bought groceries and ate by the docks.

Biking through the countryside:

Getting back was fun when we realised how far away we were. But we all made it, minus the one who got lost.

Just kidding, he beat us back to the rental shop.

It's really a problem when no one's phone works in foreign cities.

But now I'm back in Manchester and have possibly the most to do since I've been here ekkkk.