Day Twenty Six- Museum Day

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Today was officially our first day in Amsterdam. We decided that since Amsterdam is an incredibly small city, and we’re only here for 3-4 days, and it’s our last city for the trip, that we would just take this time to chill out. Have a really nice relaxing few days in Amsterdam before heading home, and not pressure ourselves to do too much.

Today was the perfect day to start that, since because of our late night last night we slept in until 10am! We left the bnb at 12 and headed straight to brunch- The Avocado Show. This is a restaurant that we have been so excited to go to since before we even added Amsterdam to our trip. It’s basically a restaurant based on avocado- every single item on the menu is avocado based. The item we have been dying to try for about a year is the Wagyu Beef Avocado Burger- a burger but the bun is literally a whole avocado. It was small, which actually ended up being a good thing as if there was any more avocado on the plate I would have thrown it at the waiter. Anyway, awesome brunch.

We then had a Museum Day. We headed to the iamsterdam sign and got a few pictures, then bought tickets for the Van Gogh Museum, the Rijksmuseum, and the Banksy exhibition at Moco Museum.

The Van Gogh museum was the most expensive, and the least impressive. Don’t get me wrong! It was amazing to see all his paintings! But we had seen quite a bit of him in the Musée D’Orsay and the Louvre so all we really learnt about was his checking himself into a mental asylum after cutting off his own ear after a fight with his roommate. Talk about drama!

The Rijksmuseum was also a little bit of a let down. It is an amazing museum, in a beautiful building and curated very well, yet we just didn’t see anything that we thought, “wow, we really are standing right in front of this”, which personally is what I want from a museum. Although, there was one thing that stood out. We walked into a room and saw a blue and white striped shirt hanging on the wall, and immediately recognised it as a uniform from a concentration camp, c.1945. It actually was incredible to stand in front of this shirt, I mean, the amount of horrors it must have seen? The amount of terrors it would have been through? Absolutely incredible, and Trudi and i were both lost for words.

We finally made it to our last museum, Banksy. I have to say, I’m in love with Banksy’s artwork. I think it’s because it’s so relatable. Each and every piece protests something that I am against, or promotes something that I am in support of. There are three levels to the Banksy exhibition, and we were told to begin at the top and work our way down. So we did that. And it was awesome. Banksy has such a unique way of pointing subtle things out to people, so subtle that most of the time it flies over everyone’s head. I suppose that’s his point. He wants us to think so deep that ideas never run over our heads.

At the end of our big Museum day it was 5pm. We were meeting Luke at 7pm so we decided to head back to the bnb and relax for a little bit and have a drink (considering it WAS 5pm). We eventually left and met Luke, and found a nice place for dinner. I ended up having a smoked salmon salad (I know, mum and dad! I know! Salmon!! Look at me go!).

Afterwards we headed over to Jordaan to find a bar with a pool table. We found one, and subsequently stayed there all night. Eventually, at around 1:30am, we realised we were all hungry (the meals at the restaurant were pretty small). We ate these traditional Dutch fries whilst dangling our legs over the side into the canal at 2am. It was an experience!

Finally got home at 2:30am. Think we’ll have a long sleep in tomorrow.

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