Day Nine - Amsterdam (May 16th)

Due to our overindulgence in Heineken's the previous evening, I woke up a little worse for wear. We had our only pre-booked event at 10:30, the Anne Frank House, so unfortunately I couldn't sleep as late as I wanted to.

We got up and found a little cafe across the street to have breakfast at. It was a very cute cafe and it ended up being quite good, despite it just being the first place we saw. I ordered the "full breakfast" because I needed a lot of food to ease my stomach's pains. My breakfast came with coffee and orange juice - the orange juice was even fresh squeezed - as in they had a huge basket of oranges and a juicer and made each glass as it was ordered - tasty! Ben also enjoyed his pancake and the first place we had been to that had refills on coffee :) (€20)

The juicer








It was very helpful to have a hotel right down the street from this church - makes it harder to get lost :)

We met Eric, Ryan and Matt at Anne Frank House at exactly 10:30, walked past the enormous line of people there and right in the door for people who had pre-booked tickets - Nice! Best decision Eric ever made was to buy those tickets a few weeks prior :)

Suckers

The Anne Frank House was one of the highlights of Amsterdam for me, despite being hungover :) This was a very interesting and sad museum. I'd read the book as a teen, so it made it all the more real seeing everything. The videos, especially the one of Otto Frank, were haunting. Definitely check this out if you're in Amsterdam, and for sure book ahead.

When we were done, we met Kirsten in front of Anne Frank House and decided what our next stop would be. First things first, I needed a diet coke, and stat (€2.50. I know that is ridiculous but you gotta do what you gotta do). Once I got that taken care of, we consulted Eric's iPhone for ideas. We ruled out Mike's Bike Tours because they were too expensive, and decided to head toward Dam Square and then the train station to find a canal cruise. I had read in Rick Steve's that there were cheaper cruises around that area - the ones near Anne Frank House were very expensive.

We walked up to Dam Square and observed the people trying to get money by "performing" for a bit, and then walked toward the train station. On the way I decided it was a little chilly still, despite being sunny, so I stopped into a souvenier shop and bought a scarf, a keychain, and a magnet (€10). We founda canal cruise right near the train station and hopped aboard (€16).

The canal cruise was an hour long and took us all around. The commentary was recorded in 5 languages and was very odd. Things like "To your left you will see a house that has many windows. It is often called the house of 1,000 windows" uh.... okay. I still got lots of great photos, so I didn't really care much about the commentary - Amsterdam is a beautiful city! For some reason before coming, I had it in my head that Amsterdam was all about drugs and prostitutes and would just be all seedy and dirty, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that wasn't the case :)

Super duper cute!


Kirsten was in worse shape than me, so she just took an hour long nap :)


We saw lots of cool looking houseboats








One interesting piece of commentary was that all houses in Amsterdam have a furniture hook at the top for moving, since all moving is done out the windows due to narrow stairways and doorways. After that, it was all I noticed on each house :)




I was sad I wasn't on the other side of the boat for that pic

Once our cruise was over, we were all pretty hungry. We stopped at the first place that looked acceptable, a gyro place, and had lunch. I thought it was pretty tasty for being so close to the train station. (€20)

We ate at the Dana Shoarma place

After lunch, we walked along the canals some more. I was still feeling icky, so while the rest of the group went to enjoy all that Amsterdam has to offer, I went back to the hotel to read my book for awhile and took a nice nap :)

Those green flags were handy


Lobby


Our room was located in an odd wing - we went up the elevator, then up some stairs, then across this little patio area... then up more stairs. That's what you get when you're paying 1/4 of the normal rate :)


There was never a more welcoming sight!

We left the hotel a little before 7 to walk to Samo Sebo for our 7:30 reservation - it is right near the Rijksmuseum, which was a fairly long walk from our hotel. It was still bright and sunny at this point, so it was a beautiful walk.

We got to Samo Sebo and it was packed - all the tables were very close to each other, mostly because everyone seemed to order the rijsttafel which takes up a good amount of space - the tables were too small, so extenders needed to be added to accomodate all the plates. Rijsttafel means "rice table" and is explained here if you are interested.

We ordered the rijsttafel, and it came out pretty quickly. We were astounded by the amount of food we got - it was insane! There were a few bowls of rice prepared in different ways, several meats, many vegetarian dishes, a salad, a fruit salad, and more... We actually ate way more of it than I thought we would, because it was so delicious! I'm really glad that Liz told me about this place - it was great! We sat next to an older couple who was from Vancouver and had a relative that lives in Owatonna - small world :) (€70 - the risttafel is a set price per person, plus we got water and coffees)

Even the chocolates were delicious :)

After dinner we were absolutely stuffed - of course as soon as we started to walk back it started to rain quite a bit, so we decided to stop into a place for a little bit to see if it let up at all. It seemed to stop raining so hard so we went back out and walked back toward Eric and the rest of the group's hotel, which was even farther awy than our hotel (we did stop at our hotel to drop off my big camera and pick a few things up). We ran into them on the street and went into one of the first bars that we saw - it was pretty swanky and had a lit up gun as a decorative item. Random. We were all pretty tired from a full day and still from the night before so we ended up only having one drink and calling it a night! (€3)

Grainy, but you can still see how beautiful Amsterdam is at night!