Spring Break Take I

Hello everyone! Sorry for posting almost a month! I've been traveling like crazy during my ridiculously long spring break.
On March 22nd, I took an Easyjet plane to Amsterdam, Holland with my friend Brittany. Once we arrived, we took a train to downtown Amsterdam where we were greeted by several of our friends who had traveled to Holland the night before. We took a tram to our hostel that was about a 15 minute ride from the city center. The hostel itself appeared to be a hotel that had decided to pack two or three bunk beds into each room. The rooms were fine but the most interesting thing was that everyone was allowed to smoke everywhere! People were smoking in the lobby, in the hallways, almost everywhere but in the bedrooms.
After getting settled in the hostel, we took a tram back into the city to do some exploring. We ate Spanish tapas for dinner. They were interesting, for those who don't know what tapas are, they are several small dishes, almost like appetizers that everyone shares at a dinner table. It was an interesting experience, but not very filling. We did have sangria, which was phenomenal.
After dinner, we walked around the city and looked in all of the touristy shops.
The next day (Easter Sunday), we got up early and headed over to the Anne Frank House and Museum. There was a decent line that we had to wait in, about 45 minutes, but it was a pretty nice day out so we didn't mind. The museum was very interesting. The house had been recently renovated and was very somber. We were guided through the various rooms of the workshop first (the Franks lived in hiding above Otto Frank's (Anne's Father) store, which he had given over to one of his associates prior to going into hiding) and then we were guided up through the actual annex.
When we got out of the museum, it was snowing! It was really neat to see the snow covering the houseboats.
While we were in Amsterdam I got to go with some friends on a river cruise tour. The tour was really exciting because not only was it in a city that has almost double the canals of Venice, Italy, but it was also snowing.
In Amsterdam I had some really interesting food. Aside from tapas, I experienced possibly the most amazing sugar loaded waffle of all time. They were served cold, Belgium waffle style with large chunks of sugar in the batter, and then here's the kicker... it was then covered with icing and sprinkles. Also, the Dutch and the Belgian people are madly in love with French fries...aka frites. The frites are served in a cone and are almost like steak fries and they are usually served with mayo.
After a couple of days, two of my friends headed to Italy, which left only three of us. We went to the Van Gogh Museum. It was a fantastic building. The artwork was organised chronologically, with his earliest works at the beginning. There are several paintings in which he (Van Gogh) tried to to realist paintings, but he quickly realised that he wasn't made out to paint people in the common sense. There were hundreds of paintings throughout the place and they were all amazing. Next, we went over to the Diamond museums. The Dutch have been known throughout the world for their fine craftsmanship with jewelry and the museum proved it. When I say museum, I really mean that it was a workshop with informational displays. We got to take a tour, which basically was me, my two friends, and four other English tourists going into a locked security monitored room to look at tiny rocks that were worth thousands of euros. It was neat. Next we headed over to the Heineken factory tour site. Unfortunately, the place was closed until summer 2008 due to renovation.
The next day my two travel companions and me took a bus to Brussels, Belgium. Getting to the bus station was a bit of a hassle. First, we had to take a train from the main train station in Amsterdam to a smaller train station about 15 miles away from the city. Once we got there, we didn’t know that we had to check in at the bus station a half hour early for our trip (I never knew you had to check into bus trips! Jeez.) Anyway, the bus ride was only about two and a half hours and it flew by. We arrived in Brussels in mid afternoon. From the bus station, we had to take the subway to our hostel. During our commute, one of my friends got her wallet stolen. When we arrived at the hostel, she got on the phone and called her mom and got everything sorted out. The hostel we were staying at was actually a really nice hotel. There were three beds and a private bathroom in the place.
After we got settled, we headed out to explore. My guidebook mentioned a statue that was a must see, so we walked towards the statue. We found it.. it is called Manneken Pis and is a fountain of a little boy peeing. It’s cute. We saw the main square of Brussels44 and then went to a pub to sample some of Belgium’s famous beers. The beers were really tasty, they were also highly alcoholic (8-9%!), and so it didn’t take much to have a really good time. So the next day we headed out to really see Brussels. We decided to take one of those double decker, get on, get off tours which was helpful. We saw the main offices of the European Union. It is really neat because the buildings are really new and modern with this really old city all around it. After taking a few pics at the EU, we got back on the bus and headed over to the epitome of tourist spots. My friend Courtney is a science major and insisted on seeing possibly the largest recreated molecule called Atomium. This thing is huge, we were able to go inside it and take pictures from the top. The building was built for the 1958 world’s fair in Brussels. From there, we headed across a street to a place called mini Europe. This place had replicas of several of Europe’s landmarks at 1:25 of their original size. It was really cool seeing a mini Big Ben and Eiffel tower as well as witnessing a mini eruption of Pompeii. After witnessing mini Europe, we headed back into the heart of the city and had dinner and went to a pub. The next day we headed over to the Musical Instrument Museum. This place was really fancy. We were given headphones and each time we approached a musical instrument display, a soundtrack of the musical instrument that we were looking at would come on in our headphones. We spent several hours here looking at all of the hundreds of different instruments. After that, we had lunch and went to Mary’s Chocolates. This chocolate shop has been revered as the best chocolate store and shop in the entire world. When we entered, we knew why. The shop had a Tiffany’s vibe to it- except instead of jewelry; it served truffles and other assorted chocolates. This chocolate shop has the privilege of being the chocolate shop that makes all of the sweets for the Belgium royal family. We bought some truffles, which were fantastic, and then headed to dinner. For dinner, my guidebook mentioned a really good Belgium food restaurant, so we decided to check it out. The restaurant was really cool. It was in the sublevel of a hotel on the main square. The food was amazing, I had a pork chop, and my friend had a rabbit stew that tasted really good. After dinner, we all headed to a pub that had a puppet show that we had bought tickets for. The show was really neat, I had never seen a genuine puppet show before, one problem was that it was in French. I was able to put some of it together, but I’m pretty sure I missed major plot points ☺ The next day we woke up before the crack of dawn at 4:15 so we could catch our bus to Frankfurt. We took a cab to the bus station and boarded the bus. The bus trip to Germany took 7 and a half hours including two stops. We watched Top Gun in German (with English subtitles) which doesn’t give the movie justice, but it was still nice to see television (I haven’t seen practically any TV since getting here.) Finally, we arrived in Frankfort. The bus dropped us off at the main train station, which was really close to our hostel. Since my guidebook of Europe didn’t have Frankfurt, I bought a city guidebook at the train station. We found our hostel and settled in. We went exploring and had a good German dinner- wiener schnitzel and beer- it was great. The next day we did some more sight seeing. We actually saw a movie while we were here, we saw “Definitely, maybe”. It was ok. The rest of our time here was spent visiting churches, walking around, and eating German food. We visited the opera house in the center of Frankfurt and had a glass of Champaign at a café, which was apparently very German, according to our waiter. In Frankfurt we also took another river cruise tour. It was a beautiful day and we were able to see a lot of the Frankfurt skyline. The last day we were in Frankfort, my friend Brittany learned the hard way the flaws in cheap airlines. Brittany was supposed fly from Frankfurt to London, take a train from London to Oxford, spend the night in Oxford at a hostel, and then take another train to Bristol in the morning. Me and my friend Caroline walked Brittany to the train station on Monday night (we were heading back to Edinburgh the next morning) and got her on the train that was going to the airport, the Frankfort airport is the busiest airport in Europe, so we left enough time for her to find her way around when she got there. So after we saw her train leave, we went to the information booth at the airport to ask when the earliest train to the airport was the next morning and the guy at the desk told us that the trains at this station didn’t go to the airport that our planes were leaving from! He proceeded to tell us that we had to take a bus to that airport and the ride would be about two hours! I call my friend Brittany and tell her the bad news and told her to get back here so we could get her on the bus. Unfortunately, by the time she got back to the station, there was no way that she could make her flight. We spent the next hour and a half in an Internet café so she could purchase another plane ticket for the next morning at 6 o’clock in the morning and cancel her hostel plans. The rest of the night was fairly laid back. We had dinner at this restaurant that was once a prison. Then we headed back to the hostel where Brittany wasn’t allowed to go back into because she had already checked out earlier, so she decided that she would spend the next two hours in the train station, take the bus at 3 o’clock in the morning to the distant airport that served Ryanair (the airline we were all flying) and get to the airport by 5,in time for her flight.
Lucky to say, she made it back to England, and we too, made it safely back to Scotland later that day.
Now that Spring break is halfway over, I am off again tomorrow to Paris with my friend Jenna! Look forward to another blog post sometime next week!
Cheers!
Max

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