We caught our 6:46 a.m. train out of Bonn to Amsterdam Friday morning. After arriving around lunchtime, we spent the day exploring the city with no defined plans. We took a nice canal cruise to get acquainted with the city and then walked around on foot more, seeing the beautifully unique buildings. In order to appease Maggie and Kanci's obsession with cats, we went to a small cat museum that we had heard about on the cruise. It was actually pretty cute, and there were cats in the museum! Then we went to an open-air market for some souvenir shopping. Next, we decided to spontaneously go to another museum, Body Worlds - a traveling exposition of real human bodies preserved through plastination. The exhibition was called the Happiness Project, and it related happiness to the body, healthy living, and physiology. As biomedical students, we found the exhibit super interesting. I enjoyed the cardiovascular and pulmonary floor of the exhibit because I knew the physiology fairly well. It was slightly stressful getting to the renal and gastrointestinal sections and realizing I didn't know any of it, but we have a test in two weeks on those units... Anyway, Friday was filled with some unexpectedly fun times!
Saturday was the main reason we went to Amsterdam for Easter - the tulip festival! We took a bus to the Keukenhof gardens, a little outside of Amsterdam. It's one of the largest gardens in the world and has more than seven million tulips in bloom. We went early in the morning to avoid the crowds (and ended up being glad we did because in the afternoon it became similar to an amusement park) and got to walk around the gardens for a couple of hours. The flowers were so beautiful, and there were so many variants of tulips! It was such a fun, relaxing day surrounded by color. After going back to the city, we did the Heineken experience, which included a tour of the brewery to learn how beer was made and having a couple of free beers on the rooftop bar overlooking Amsterdam. It was a lot of fun! We then rushed over to the Chinese Palace, a restaurant on the main canal, for our dinner reservations and had a delicious Chinese dinner. We were not very interested in eating Dutch food while in the Netherlands because it mostly consists of herring and other fish, potatoes, and fries. After dinner, we adventured over to the Red Light District. It was quite shocking walking through the alleys along the canal seeing prostitutes in the windows and smelling weed everywhere. After our curiosity subsided, we went to the most tame bar we could find, "The Old Sailor," for some drinks (which happened to be free thanks to a drunk bar tender and some guys from New York). We headed back to the hostel to go to bed relatively early.
Sunday morning - Easter! Before leaving for Amsterdam, I had found an English-speaking church right outside the city, so we all went to Easter mass in English! It was so nice to be able to understand the language for Easter mass. The priest was really sweet; he passed out Easter eggs at the end to all the children, sang happy birthday to a girl, and then asked all the visitors from various countries to stand to be acknowledged. It was a great Easter in a foreign country with my friends, but I did realize I missed spending Easter with my family. After heading back into town, we ate brunch at a restaurant near the Anne Frank House for some pancakes and mimosas. Since we had a little time before our reservation at the Anne Frank House, we went to take pictures on the Fault in our Stars bench. Then, on our way back to the Anne Frank House, it started hailing! When it was time for our reservation, we went to the Anne Frank House for a half-hour introductory program. (Side note: Earlier in the semester, when we went to Munich, I bought The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank at the Dachau concentration camp. Since then, I had been reading it on the bus to and from the AIB and finished just in time for Amsterdam.) We then got to tour the house with audio-guides. It was surreal to see everything Anne had described in her diary (it was fresh in my mind). Touring the secret annex was an impacting experience and one of my favorites of Amsterdam.
Monday was our last day in Amsterdam, so we finished our weekend by going to the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum. Van Gogh is my favorite artist, so I really, really enjoyed the Van Gogh museum. I actually enjoyed it so much that I spent two and a half hours in there (which was me trying to hurry), and my friends left me to go wait in line for lunch at a restaurant that we didn't make a reservation for. I met up with them later, and they were still waiting in line - so I didn't miss anything. The trendy restaurant we waited so long to eat at was called the Avocado Show. It is a brand-new restaurant that serves mostly avocado dishes, and it was delicious! After lunch, we went to the Rijksmusem and sped through it because there was so much to see and only about an hour to do it. It was pretty cool, but I definitely recommend the Van Gogh Museum over the Rijksmuseum.
Now for the mishap: One of our connecting trains in between Amsterdam and Bonn was cancelled due to rail construction. We got stuck in Venlo, the Netherlands, and the next train out wasn't until 5 a.m. the next day. We had no other option but to get a hotel room in Venlo for the night and take the early train back to Bonn to try and make it to class on time. It ended up all working out, but it was an unfortunately stressful end to our otherwise lovely weekend. After getting back into Bonn at 7 a.m. and going home to grab my backpack, I was only ten minutes late to class. It really was inevitable for something to go wrong at some point during the semester traveling through Europe; it just didn't end up happening until our very last trip.
As you can see from this novel of a blog, I had a fun weekend packed with great experiences. Amsterdam was a good choice to be the last weekend travel trip. I am really sad to even be saying that it's my last weekend of travel in Europe for the semester... I know now the rest of the trip is going to fly by.
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