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Published: March 18th 2008
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This last weekend my friend Diana and I met up in Amsterdam! She is studying abroad in Florence and was on her spring break and wanted to meet up in a random city so we decided on Amsterdam. I took a couple days off school, (the other Americans were gone the same days anyway on a trip to Paris) and got there around noon on Thursday. This was my first trip ever where I had to be responsible for finding my way around a new city, every other trip I usually let my mom or dad take care of that or someone else who wants to, but luckily we didnt have many problems! Our hostel was kind of far away from the main city so we had to take a bus every time we went anywhere, but otherwise it was a decent place to stay.
Thursday we didnt do too much beside wander around one of the main squares, we found the Van Gogh Museum but it was too late to go inside so we did a little shopping and drank some hot chocolate. We wanted traditional dutch food for dinner, but we didnt know exactly what that was. We saw
a couple restaurants advertising dutch pancakes so we thought that sounded good! Those were good pancakes too! They were huge and you could put just about anything on them! I had blueberry syrup and ice cream on mine and they were delicious!
The next day we woke up kind of early and headed to the Van Gogh Museum. That was really cool to see because I studied him a little in my french high school classes. we learned more about his life and saw some of his originals like the sunflowers and cherry blossoms. After the van gogh museum, we decided we needed a break to sit down so we took a canal ride around the city. that was interesting and our tour guide was very entertaining, he played a lot of random songs but also let us know some interesting facts about amsterdam. After that we had some lunch and planned on doing the Heineken Experience. Heineken was all over Amsterdam and we were excited to do the tour but it was closed for renovations until summer! We were pretty disappointed. Later that day we went out to dinner at an Argentinian place. There are a ton of ethnic
restaurants in Amsterdam! We saw just about every cultures cuisine. The Argentinian food was good, i just got steak so it wasnt too strange! Later we went to a late night comedy show. That was really cool, the company who put it on is called boom chicago and all the comics are american which made it a lot easier for us to understand! the show was all improv and was really funny! i especially like the part where the comics came up with the worst slogans for products.
On Saturday we first went to Anne Franks House. It is where she was in hiding for a couple years during the war. That was very interesting but very sad as well. Later we walked around a part of town called the Jordaan which is known for its shopping, we didnt find too much though and later we had more pancakes! I took a picture of these pancakes, it has bananas and ice cream on it! After our pancakes we decided we needed to see the red light district, so we started looking for it and a couple hours later we finally found it! We did take a couple pit stops along
the way but it took us forever to find the place! That was interesting to say the least, it is pretty close to how i pictured it with the prostitutes in the doorways with the red light on and everything. We walked around there a little and did some people watching which was fun in that part of town and then we headed back to another square for dinner. That night we had Indian food, it was good but spicy! I ordered mild too!
The next morning Diana had to get up early to catch her flight so I saw the city a bit myself. It was raining and I had to haul around my backpack so I ended up taking another canal ride, that tour guide wasnt as cool as the first one. He didnt play any music and just ran the tape and pointed at some stuff. That was really all I had time to do before I had to catch my flight back to Nice. It was great to be home though! The weather was kind of cold and rainy in amsterdam when i left but it was in the upper seventies in Nice with clear skies!
Amsterdam is a very cool city, I would go back sometime but i would like to see more of the countryside then too. There were a ton of tulips around and pictures of the tulip fields and windmills and it was very pretty! I also liked how there were a ton of bikes in Amsterdam! When i was researching about places to go, it said to rent a bike to get around and there really were bikes all over the place! You had to be careful of them though because I feel like the bikes always had the right of way.
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