Sorry these posts drag on and on (and on…) but wouldn’t want you to miss even one important detail!!! And neither would you.
Like this potato we ate from a place called Jacketz, a restaurant based off of hugggge potatoes roasted with salt and oil and then you add the toppings you fancy, like beet salad and goat cheese.
Despite my grumbling about going there, Luis wanted to try it and shared it, and it was good! Who would have thought 😉
Then we walked into the center, with a plan of doing a cruise.
Along the way, I lost a dear friend who has traveled all around Europe with me.
RIP water bottle.
But despite the sadness, we carried on…
It kind of looks like a photo-shopped him into that photo haha.
We decided to start the cruise near the Anne Frank house (where we saw the 2+ hour that we would eventually endure). There are lots of cruises to choose from (Lover’s, Blue Boat, and Canal to name a few). Lover’s and Canal leave from the Anne Frank house, but Lover’s was sold out for the day, so we went with Canal (1 hour and 40 minutes total, since it’s a hop-on, hop-off cruise…not into the water though. It docks, haha). We caught the boat within 15 minutes and were happy to sit in the nice, toasty boat.
I imagine it would be really, really nice in the summer time or warmer months, since the windows were a little foggy from the cold and people’s hot breath, but at least it was warm!!
We saw some open-air cruises go by and I’m pretty sure those people are certified ca-ray-zey. We stayed on the boat for almost an hour and then they told us we would have to get off and wait for the next one since it was the last stop for that boat. Wait 20 minutes? No thanks. We did the next best thing–> food. First we had to walk towards the center where I admired all of my future #housegoals.
Those windows! and the high ceilings! and warm lights!
And meandered throughout the streets with the nice lights and fun shop windows.
We had a mission to go eat pancakes, but we obviously can’t go more than 30 minutes sans sandwich stop.
This was a good one though- soft, spelt bread with roasted chicken and avocado.
Nom nom.
We were trying to get to ____ for pancakes (need to ask Luis and fill this in), since Luis read they are the best ones in Amsterdam. We basically jogged there, climbed up the steepest, most narrow stairs in the world….
Only to find out they were closing. Major sad faces. I was starting to get frustrated with the lack of things “working” on this trip…from the crazy lines at the Heineken Experience, to taking the more expensive canal cruise and then getting kicked off, then this. It was frustrating for me, and as you can imagine, I was a big, bundle of joy for Luis. I was especially fun because I knew we were heading to the Anne Frank house, where there was likely to be a two hour wait in the cold. We were told that if you don’t have tickets (we didn’t…when I looked a month earlier, they were sold out), that the line would likely be at least an hour, but since it was the holidays, expect two hours. LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES! GET TIX EARLY! It didn#t end up being all that bad in the end, the line moved fairly quickkly (like an hour in the toe-numbing cold), but we stupidly waited longer for the Heineken experience, so I really couldn’t complain.
The Anne Frank House is a must-see for any visit to Amsterdam, as it is an important part of the history of the city and a powerful reminder of the horrors that happened there, as well as so many other cities in Europe. I thought the museum/ exhibition was well-done and informative, as it’s an hour-long self-guided tour that takes you through each room of the annex. It was larger than I imagined it to be, but they also had 8 people there, which most certainlxy made it much smaller. Mix that in with fear, uncertainty, and a lack of fresh air, and I’m sure the space was even tighter. The only thing I felt the museum could do better is that I really believe that at the end of the exhibition (or anywhere, really), they should have some mention of the other millions of Jewish people that were murdered. While, yes, it was Anne Frank’s House, and it was her diary that motivated this exhibition, I felt that it would be approproate to educate people a little bit more about the others. Like Luis said, people understand and sympathiye more when there is a face attached to tragedy, but now that they have all of those visitiors interested, it’s a good time to remind them of the millions of others.
We spent about an hour in the museum, reading and learning about each room and looking at the various artifcats, and then made our way out to the Red Light district for one last walk-through.
And just walked around.
I don’t remember what we did after that, but I don’t have any photographic proof of whatever it was, so we’ll end things here. Thanks for reading!!!