Edam and Amsterdam- Night 2

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Bikes, cheese, and clogs...oh my!

I started my day just like everybody else...hungover and tired. We jumped in the coach for a short drive to Edam, a little town just outside of Amsterdam, for a bike ride. In Amsterdam, and I guess Holland in general, everyone rides bikes all over the place. You should see the bike parking garage in the city. It literally was stories high and packed with thousands of bikes. Cars and pedestrians have to yield to the bikes! In Edam we clambered on our "granny bikes" which were just like beach cruisers. Our bike guide lady talked to us for a little bit about where we were going and to be careful about parking our bikes since they often times fell over since people didn't put the kick stands down correctly. Well, literally when she got done saying that sentence, my bike toppled to the ground. Redfaced, I picked it up and laughed. Although, I was pretty embarassed and it was only the 2nd day I had been around with all of these people. Once we got on our "grannies" we rode all around the city which looked like it a painting from a page of snow white or some other fairy tale. The houses and building looked like gorgeous cottages, the roads were cobblestone, and the grass was green. There was even weeping willows and flower boxes on every window. We stopped to look at windmills and sheep and stuff. It truly was a gorgeous place! On the drive back to the city we stopped at a cheese and clog makers where we saw a clog making demonstration and I tried about 10 different kinds of cheese. They were all good, but I like the plain kind the best. I know- I'm a true dynamo.
Once we got back to the city we didn't have tons of time so I basically had to decide the two things that I wanted to do the most while I was there. I decided to visit the Anne Frank House Museum and then go to the Heineken Brewery. Equal amounts history and festivity. The Anne Frank house was amazing. If you know the story it is absolutely unbelievable to see the actual place where she stayed for years with her family and the stairwell they climbed through. They have truly done a great job with this museum. There isn't any of the actual furniture there that was there when the family lived there since the Nazi's destroyed it, but you really get choked up when you here the dialogue and see the walls, which remain untouched, throughout the house. After Anne Frank, Siobhan and I walked a good ways to the Heineken Brewery. On the walk there I swear we had a man tailing us, so we decided to go stealth and hid out in some little shops until we lost him. The brewery was fun, one of the better tours I've been on, and we got 3 beers for out admission price of 11 euro. (That was cheaper than the 2 beers I had bought the night before!) So I felt like I got a pretty good deal.
Later on that night we went on a very entertaining and drink a plenty canal cruise throughout the city. I drank a lot of red wine and had a great time on that still getting to know everybody. After the cruise, we went out for a little while back to the Leinsplein area, but made it a little bit of an earlier night since we had to get up really early the next morning to leave for Berlin.

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