Amsterdam

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I don’t know that I would recommend choosing to essentially do a day trip on a layover after flying to Europe and having a timeframe…especially having not traveled internationally for a bit. Canada doesn’t count. Navigating transportation was a comedy of errors that necessitated rushing around, which is not very fun when trying to see things!

Anne Frank House
I’m not quite sure how to describe the house. For me, with everything I have studied, it was more about the experience. I chose not to pick up the audio tour. I could hear it on others’ speakers but really wanted to just see the house and be in the rooms and understand the annex from the perspective of being there. It gives me a better appreciation for the situation they were in and the small spaces that they had to exist in for two years. Walking through the building, seeing where the helpers worked. Walking in the annex and thinking about how they surely knew exactly where the floor boards creaked and how much they could move about during the day. It was interesting to see the painted windows that protected spices, which was an important staple to the economy there. Little bits and pieces of history not even related to Nazi Germany/Holocaust. By the time I finished walking through, I was absolutely famished and sat down in the cafe there and had a sandwich while I people watched over the canal before heading over to my canal tour.

Canal Tour
The tour was great. Our tour guides were a lot of fun and shared a lot of fun history with us.
A few fun facts:
• The canals are only a few meters deep and were dug by hand.
• There are quite a number of house boats-some boats, some actual houses. They became popular as an untaxed property to live on and now the most expensive house boat just went for 2.7M Euros.
• Also famous for Dutch East Indian Spices, doors of protected UNESCO properties are painted green.
• Being a city of bicycles, it is unsurprising that many get stolen. It’s cheaper to buy a stolen bike than a new one, so people resort to buying cheap stolen bikes instead of continuing to replace their own. If you find your bike and can prove it is yours, you can get a 20% discount off the price! 😅
• 9-12k bicycles are picked out of the canals every year. Thrown in by strunken*, fallen in, blown in. They have to clean these out so that boats can continue to pass through the canals.
*strunken-high & drunk

I was so glad once I made it back to the airport and my gate before boarding! I completely passed out en route to Copenhagen. Some of my photos aren’t loading so I will have to revisit that later.

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Photos

Anne Frank House
Not supposed to take photos. It’s hard to believe that they were in that annex for so long. Unfathomable to stand in the rooms.

Cafe at Anne Frank House
Food at cafe at Anne Frank House before boat tour.

Amsterdam Canal
I guess the guy wanted to be in my photo.

Dutch Gouda & Cheddar
I think.. definitely Gouda. And I definitely make dietary exceptions in Europe.

Tiny House
Man refused to sell so they built around his house.

Japanese Restaurant copy
…that’s kitchen sank into the water when they didn’t take freshwater buoyancy into consideration when building. Oops.

Which one is the fake house?
Aesthetic measures in place.

Fault in our stars benches
But copycats because origs stolen