Dam

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Sooo... Amsterdam. Yup. Pretty much everything you've heard about Amsterdam is true. The sex, the drugs, the tulips, the windmills. We had an authentic taste of Amsterdam and sampled everything the city threw at us. First we checked into our decently nice hotel, had a yummy buffet dinner then headed downtown and took a canal cruise that included free drinks and cheese and crackers. We got a head start at being drunk and then those of us that wanted to go went to a live sex show. The first girl came out and started dancing and then she needed a volunteer and you know me, I always get picked when I raise my hand in theme parks and apparently it works in the red light district as well. So I go up, and let's just say I was part of the show... Then a couple came out and we watched them have full-on sex, it was interesting to say the least. By this time, we were pretty drunk. After watching around two couples have sex and a bunch of strippers, (one of whom was a dominatrix, whipping a boy from the audience) the last girl came on and needed four or so volunteers so I put Shaun's hand up and he went up there and danced among *ahem* other things. I needed to use the washroom and when I was done, the group had already left so me and Shaun went window shopping, and i'll leave it at that.

Then we stumbled (literally) upon "The Grasshopper," a big coffee shop/bar/restaurant. We found some of the group there and hung out for a bit, and the basement closed so we had to go up to the bar part and I danced and had a drink. There were only three of us that wanted to leave at that point. We headed to Central Station and after some Dutch confusion, which may have just been late night confusion, we finally got on a train and picked a seat room with a slider door and the seats facing each other like in Harry Potter. We were in there with two other guys, a guy from Manhattan and his blind friend. We had a good talk about our travels and figured out that we were all going to the same hotel. We decided to share a taxi since we were supposed to go to the airport and take the shuttle back to the hotel, but it was past 2 and the last one was just before 2. We had a very short sleep, got up and had breakfast and got on the coach to go back into Amsterdam.

We headed into some shops and got souvenirs then headed to the Anne Frank House which was absolutely amazing. It's incredible that they hid as long as they did, and so sad that Otto Frank survived only to find that his daughters were killed in concentration camps. The most disgusting part of it all was a picture that they had of the Anne Frank memorial and someone had spray painted a red swastika on it. How can people be so cruel and stupid? There are neo-nazis that still claim that either the holocaust didn't happen or not as many people were killed as reported. I touched Anne's walls and the pictures of hers were still pasted to the wallpaper! We crawled through the bookcase door and it's overwhelming to think that people actually hid in there, being as quiet as possible. Definately an eye opener and reminder of what some people are capable of.

(Afterwards Note: I just want to write this down so I will remember it later. They had this really cool room in the Anne Frank House where everyone sat next to their own buttons and on this big screen it would ask personal belief questions about hot topics that people normally wouldn't go voicing their opinions on openly. You would answer discreetly with the buttons and then it would show a chart of the percentages of what people in the room answered and the total of people's choices in the past. It was really awesome and a really cool idea. After they'd show the results, everyone would kind of eye everyone else in the room trying to guess who the prejudice, racist or simply retarded people were.)

We entered a church and discovered Rembrandt was buried there! We also saw a movie being filmed.

We then headed to St. Goar, Germany. We watched a stein demo and I bought three of the ones meant for drinking. I didn't have time to visit the cookoo clock store but there were teddy bears there worth thousands. We then went to wine taste in a 17th century wine cellar which was very cool and I don't know how this is possible but it seemed like everyone got drunk off of tour shotglass sized cups of wine. The first one was bitter and it got sweeter as we went until glass four. Then if we wanted to, we could taste their ice wine, made from frozen grapes. It takes the amount of grapes that it would take to make eight bottles of regular wine to make one small bottle of ice wine. I bought a bottle of ice wine and a bottle of the last one we tried that was sweeter. The ice wine is meant to be drunk with a dessert or something sweet and a very small amount at a time (VERY SWEET!). Our hotel was not the best and there was mould in the bathroom and nothing smelled good. Shaun had a cold shower and the phone was broken, and the tv didn't work but I didn't care because i'm in Germany.

We're now on the coach (why my writing is so bad) heading to Munich for Oktoberfest! Yay! Praise You by Fatboy Slim just came on. Our day song is Pump It by The Black Eyed Peas. I love Germany, it's beautiful here.

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