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Published: December 3rd 2012
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Anne Frank Huis.I woke up expecting to have a crippling hangover, but once I got up and got ready it really wasn’t too bad. I had missed breakfast so we got right on the coach and headed into Amsterdam. Our first stop was the Anne Frank museum. We waited in line for it to open, and witnessed two people get into a nearly physical fight over who should get in first. I’ve been reading about the Holocaust and Anne Frank for a long time, so it was very interesting to finally be able to see her house in person. It was sad though, knowing what had happened. We got to see her original diaries, and there was a bookstore, but I didn’t buy anything. We had a snack in the coffeeshop above her house, where I got a mocha with an excessive amount of whipped cream on top.
There wasn’t anything else that I really wanted to see in Amsterdam, so Melissa, Candice, and I decided to go shopping. Emily came along with us, and we went to some touristy souvenir stores. I bought a mini pair of clogs and some postcards. Nothing much was open until 11:00 am, and it was
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Amsterdam only 10 at this point. Emily eventually went off on her own, and we ended up finding a shopping mall, but we couldn’t figure out how to get inside. We forced out way through something that looked like an entrance and finally found ourselves inside the mall. However, it was deserted, and none of the stores were open yet. We had actually forced our way in through the staff entrance, and the mall wasn’t even open yet. One store actually let us shop early, but the next one kicked us out. We waited with everyone else until it was open at 11 and then shopped some more. I didn’t find anything I really liked, and eventually we left to go to the meeting point at the Centraal Station. We arrived right on time and got back on the coach to leave for our next destination: St. Goar.
I was excited to go to Germany because that’s where my grandparents are from, and my dad has visited there several times. I hadn’t had a chance to practice a new language, because I don’t know a single word in Dutch, and I’m a failure at German as well. All I knew
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Rhine River were
danke,
ja, and
nein. It was easier for the people from South Africa, because their language (Afrikaans) is very similar to both Dutch and German (I think). It didn’t take too long to get to St. Goar, which was a very tiny village on the banks of the Rhine River. The drive was beautiful; the scenery was all mountains, castles, and the river. When we arrived we first went to a beer stein shop and the guy there told us all about the different kinds he had. It was interesting, but I wasn't going to buy one. What would I ever use it for? Then we went to a cuckoo clock store and saw the biggest hanging cuckoo clock in the world. It wasn’t actually that big, but it was still pretty neat. We went to a Birkenstocks store (where Heidi Klum's collection is sold), and me and Korryn went for a walk down to the end of the town. It only took about half an hour, that’s how small it is. But it is very pretty. It seemed like a ghost town, because there weren’t any people anywhere.
Back at the hotel we had dinner and then
004
Wine tasting I left to do a wine tasting. At home I hate wine, but I really didn’t mind it on my trip. It’s kind of a atmospheric thing, I guess. When you're in Europe, you drink wine. And if everyone else is drinking it, you drink it. And if it's free (haha). The wine tasting was held in a cellar down the street from our hotel, and we all sat at a really long table in the dark. The man there told us about the different wines and we ended up tasting five different kinds. My favourites were the sweet kinds, plus the ice wine. I was rooming that night with Candice and Faith and our hotel room was so comfortable. It was the best hotel we had the whole trip. The beds were very comfortable and the bathroom was nice and clean. I decided to have an early night because it didn’t seem like there was much going on and I was exhausted from Amsterdam.
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