Nether-Netherlands

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This could be Rotterdam....

I went to Rotterdam for a while on the way to seeing Frederike in Leiden. There is a lot of construction going on around the train station, and all over town, so first impressions not that good! But it got much better after I had a chinese food snack for lunch in China Town, and went for a walk. I walked through a lot of parks and towards the river. Some of the buildings in Rotterdam are fabulous, very modern, slick and colourful. And the bridge across the river adds to the modern feel. There was a war monument, and along the river a load of flags, I think it may have been every country, there were so many! There was a harbour with some old boats and some buildings similar to those I saw in Ghent, but otherwise it's a very up to date town, and obviously with all the construction it is still being updated! One area called Blaak was facinating; it has a metro station that looks like a UFO, a library with bright yellow pipes on the outside, and a weird housing complex with cube shaped houses! I went inside one, it was like a museum, where you could see what life is like living at odd angles (not good- I banged my head!) the living room at the top was the wierdest- the roof is triangluar! I feel I kind of understand the song a bit now: this could be Rotterdam, or anywhere... as I was walking around I kept seeing things and thinking ''that reminds me of New York, that reminds me of Swansea, that reminds me of Portsmouth...'' very hotchpotch place but has a great feel to it. I will have to go back when all the construction is finished I think, because it kind of ruined the atmosphere a bit!

Leiden (like the place where I grew up only not spelt the same!)

I met Frederike at Leiden station, it was so amazing to see her, it was a strange situation because we spent 2 months constantly together in Peru, and now I haven't seen her for a year and a half! But we spent a fantastic week together, I loved every minute 😊
she took me straight back to her place in a village outside Leiden, where she rents a room in a house, from a very sweet old lady called Mrs Goodheart (I think it is not spelt like this but that is what it means in Dutch!) and her dog Timmy and another student Sabrina who I met very briefly! But Fre has a nice room and the house is good to live in. That evening we ate omlettes, watched friends (of course!) and had a catchup it was very nice!
The next day I decided to chill because i'd been doing nothing but walking for 10 days, so I stayed in Fre's room on the internet, while she went on a train for 6 hours because she had lost her bag oops! That evening we cooked indonisian vegetables and rice, was yummy! and we watched Little Miss Sunshine, a film I love!
Next day was kind of rainy so I went to museums. I went to Rijksmuseum which has loads of Egyptian stuff, as well as Roman, Greek, Etruscan and a bit about the Romans in the Netherlands. It was a very cool museum (yes I am a geek haha!) and I was there for hours! I met Fre for lunch and we briefly went to the university canteen, then I went back to the museum! when I finished there i still hadn't had enough of museums so I went to the ethnology museum, although it was closing in an hour so i just had a quick look around the ground floor. There was loads of stuff from Asia, Africa, Oceania and Indonesia, and an exhibition on the Maya. I could have spent hours in there as well but I only had one!
Then I did something very scary and Frederike took me home on the back of her bike! It took 20 mins ish and really wasn't that bad! i cooked us some spagetti bolognese and we chilled out some more that evening.

AmsterDAM!!

My first impression as we left the train station at Amsterdam was ''eew its disgusting!!!'' The bin men have been on strike so there is rubbish everywhere!!! We walked down the touristy bit, full of tacky shops and so many people, onto the Dom square, where the Dom is covered in scaffolding- so far so good haha! But then we headed further from the toursit area and into the Amsterdam I remember from when I went 3 years ago, all the canals and pretty streets, people on bikes everywhere. We wanted to go to Anne Frank's house but the queue was huge and we decided it was too cold to stand outside for ages! I have been before anyway, and I'm sure Frederike will be back!
We walked back towards the main shopping street, the most expensive in Amsterdam, until we found a little piece of tranquillity in the Beginhof. On the way to the courtyard we stopped at a museum where they had some exhibition stuff outside, about the orphans who used to live and work in the buildings, and one room had lots of paintings in it and a huge statue of David and Goliath, very wierd! The Beginhof, where Nuns used to live, is still used today as a place women can live in peace and quiet (apart from the tourists of course!) There is a little church we went in, and another little chapel which had very pretty decoration in. The courtyard was very peaceful, statues on the lawn and lots of flowers (tulips of course), was very tranquil!
We decided to get some lunch so found a cute little cafe and I had a very dutch meat roll (sorry Fre I cant remember what it was called!) which was tasty, and some tea to warm up. Then we headed back onto the street, and found the flower market, selling every kind of Dutch flower, bulbs, fake flowers, even grow your own cannabis kits! And we went to a shop called the Magic Mushroom or something, to see all the wierd drug accessories you can get.
Next stop was the Rijksmuseum, which we had to queue in the cold for but it was worth it! They had loads of items from when the Dutch were at war with the English, which was of course amusing for us, being a Dutch girl and an English girl. And lots of famous paintings, including Veneer, and loads by Rembrandt. We saw the Night Watch by Rembrandt which was fantastic! We had to hurry through the last few rooms because we were taking to long, you know me and museums, I could spend hours!
So after we were thrown out at closing time we went for a walk in the nearby park, the Vondelpark, which is famous because of a hippy movement in the 70s. It was nice but didn't stay long, we wanted some waffles! I remembered them from my last trip to Amsterdam, waffles with icing on top, but couldnt find them anywhere! Well we ended up in a bakery having hot chocolate and I had a cream donut with chocolate on top so i was happy anyway! Then we headed home, very late, and cooked pancakes at about 10 o'clock at night!

Leiden part 2

The next morning was glorious sunshine and we went to the beautiful flower gardens of Keukenhof. Flowers, flowers everywhere and so beautiful! All the different colours of tulip, all with different names we enjoyed looking at! Some displays were just blocks of colour but we preferred the ones with a mixture. They also had indoor displays, we went inside the Lily building, which was beautiful but smelled so strong! And the exotic plant building I really liked because it had loads of different colour orchids, gorgeous! The park was set out so nicely, walkways and fountains and cafes dotted around. And a windmill you could go in and look down at the fields with the tulips growing. When we went it was the last weekend the park was open so there wasn't many tulips left, and as we watched there were people in the field picking more. The windmill was good though, and there was a giant clog outside which of course we had to sit in and get a picture! We had lunch which we made that morning, and brought a very expensive mango juice. The place was so nice, in spite of the huge amount of tourists, but we decided to go back to Leiden and do a bit more sightseeing there.
We had a map with a historical walk around Leiden so we followed that. Leiden is a very historical town, with a few windmills, 17th century canals, buildings such as alms houses for the poor and lots of old churches, and the University that was built in 1575 and is why Leiden became such a big town. It´s a beautiful town and I wish we´d had a bit more time to look around, but we then got on the train to Amersfoort to see Frederike´s family and spend the weekend with them. Fre´s mum and sister, Leisbeth and Anna-Sophie met us at the station, we had a lovely meal of ´´MEAT´´ and vegetables, and Leisbeth showed me her pictures of when she went on a huge trip around India in the 70s they were fantastic pictures!!!

Boat trip!

We all went to stay on Fre´s Dad´s boat on the weekend. 6 of us piled in the car, me, Frederike, her mum and sister, her sister´s boyfriend, and her friend Merije (said a bit like Meriah!) it was about half an hours drive to the harbour where the boat is, on a lake that used to be the sea until they put a dike there and got rid of the salt somehow! It´s a very posh harbour, the royal family have their boat there! So we met Frederike´s Dad Willy and her auntie Martha there too, we were quite a party!
It was very peaceful on the water, lots of boats sailing, we went past Marka, an artificial island made for defence, a lighthouse nicknamed the ´white horse´because that is what it looked like from a distance, and we drank tea and ate cookies! We stopped at q gorgeous little tradtional Dutch village and went for a walk. on closer observation it was very touristy and busy, but still worth a look. One hotel that was there had loads of famous people stay there, including Renoir, Walt Disney and Elisabeth Taylor to name a few! We could only stay for an hour in the harbour, so we then sailed to where we were staying the night. on the way we went past a replica of the old ship Batavia, at which point Merije got very excited, she volunteers there as a tour guide and was looking forward to giving her first tour in english the next day - to us! It was a beautiful ship and I could´t wait to see it.
In the evening we had a lovely dinner of chicken, spring onions in an Indonesian sauce and rice- very tasty! Fre, Merije and I went out on the rowing boat around the harbour, the sun was setting and it was beautiful (dispite the spiders in the boat which I had to get rid of!) I had never rowed a boat before and wasn´t that good, but apparently not bad for my first time either! We all managed to fit into the boat to sleep, I slept on the dining room table that converts into a bed!
Next morning was Frederike´s birthday and I cooked her and the family an English breakfast; eggy bread, sausages, baked beans, tomatoes, and bacon. I think everyone enjoyed it! Merije went off to work and we went to a different bit of water and anchored down for a bit to relax in the sun. At 2 o´clock we went over to the Batavia, where we saw a video about the story of the boat, and met Merije for our tour. She took us through the workshops where they are working on a replica of another ship called the Seven Provinces. The huge shell of the ship was outside in the courtyard, we could go up to the top, really high, and apparently we were actually near the bottom of the boat, when it´s finished it will be huge!!! We went inside the smithy where they make nails and things for the ship. Everything on the ships is made authentically, as it would have been made at the time. The man in the smithy kindly made me a nail as a souvenir, it was great!
Then we got to go onto the Batavia, it was so amazing how people lived on the ship, 340 of them in such cramped conditions, for 9 months from Amsterdam to Indonesia (when Netherlands owned Indonesia). One deck was so low you couldn´t stand up, and 90 soldiers bound for Indonesia had to stay there, in the dark, they were allowed outside for half an hour a day. Punishment was very harsh for misbehavior, as in such close quarters if one person caused trouble it could cause chaos. The toilets were the best, outside, straight into the sea, and a rope through the toilet that went right down into the sea, you pulled it up to wipe yourself then put it back through!
We finished on the ship at about 5 and headed back to the boat. When we got back to the harbour we had a beautiful dinner in the posh restaurant at the harbour. I had mushroom soup and duck with vegetables and chips, it was gorgeous! Martha tried snails! We didn´t get home until midnight, I was very tired! But I think Frederike had a good birthday so that´s the main thing!

Amersfoort.

In the morning I said goodbye to Frederike and Anna-Sophie, who had to go to uni/ college, and Leisbeth took me into Amersfoort as I decided to have a look around before I left. The town was so pretty, a beautiful street called Muurhuizen, each house was different heights and colours, it was so lovely! The church was pretty too, and on the hour a little clock below the church chimes and a little George comes out and slays a little dragon! The Koppelpoort gate was also very interesting to see, and charming over the canal. I really liked Amersfoort, small and quaint!

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Comments

[Chloe]

Jealous!
Amy your blogs make me so jealous while I'm stuck here revising! Looks like your having a great time, you and Fre. I love how in some ways it reminds me of Peru - youre still taking videos! And also I think I climbed that bell tower when I was in Belgium in year 6, so long ago! Glad youre enjoying yourself, its great hearing what your up to xxx