Belgium: Amster-freaking-dam

Monday, December 11, 2006

Amster-freaking-dam

An Amsterdam weekend... wow. It was great! On Friday night my friend Kirsten (red head in before blog) invited me to stay at her house cuz it's closer to the train station and I said yeah that'd be great! So on Friday a few of us went to see Little Miss Sunshine (loved it), we went to check out the Brussels Christmas Market and saw a huge ferris wheel and we were just like um... we have to. So we went up and got a nice view of the city and it was pretty cool. Then 4 of us spent the night at Kirsten's. It was a really nice chill night we just hung out a talked. Then we had to wake up at 8 to be able to get the train station on time cuz me and Joe were both going but of course I slowed things down a little bit.. whoops. We ended up sprinting for the tram but got there with about 30 seconds to spare. Then we took a 3 hours train ride to Amsterdam, just some good times on that train.

Once we arrived we pretty much had absolutely no idea where we going but Joe seems to have this amazing sense of direction where he can figure out where everything is even in a city he's never been to. First thing we did was check out some of the souvenir shops but most of them were full of dirty crap so we went outta those then checked out the floating flower market, which was pretty cool. We were cheapos and got bread, meat and cheese at a grocery store for lunch, but that’s ok, I think it’s an exchangie rule that lunch is always that. After that we explored the city a little bit... or more like we were searching for the Anne Frank house in the hail then ended up running into the Van Gogh museum instead and decided to go there. It was amazing! For those of you who don’t know, Van Gogh is one of my favorite painters, if not THE favorite painter. I was so excited. Unfortunately, they didn’t have Starry Night or Night Café but I was perfectly happy with the collection. They did have his 2 famous flower paintings, Sunflowers and the purple ones, I forget what it’s called, Bedroom, and one of his most famous self-portraits. I won’t lie, I was in shock. I was just like “Wow, I’m standing right in front of a Van Gogh painting. He really sat in front of this canvas and painted on it.” It was a cool experience for me. Unfortunately, cameras were not allowed, like any other museum and therefore no pictures. I'm disappointed too.

After the Van Gogh museum we did a canal tour and it was so beautiful, on all the bridges they put those little lightbulbs that I love so much on the circular part... if you know what I'm talking about. And everything was all decked out for Christmas so that was pretty cool. We went to our hostel, which I was pleasantly suprised about how good it was. I mean it was no 4 star hotel but I was expecting a little crap hole. It was a Christian one and everyone who worked there was a volunteer. That night we ate some Chinese food... sssoooooo good! It had been a while since I had some good Chinese food. Delicious! Then we went bar hopping until about 0130 cuz our curfew was 0200 and honestly I was pretty tired so I had absolutely zero problem with that.

We woke up the next morning at 0730... ouch. We got free breakfast and hot showers at the hostel then headed out to the Anne Frank House. Amazing once again. I've always been really interested in that time in history and it was surreal. I feel like I need to reread the book now. Once again, no cameras :( but I highly reccommend going to both the Van Gogh and the Anne Frank house, if anyone just happens to be in Amsterdam for a bit. Then everyone wanted to go to the Heineken beer museum and I kinda didn't want to but had to cuz everyone else did. It was actually pretty cool, they had some really fun stuff to do. There was this place where we could be Heineken DJ's, or sit in these really cool chairs that were like circles so we just lounged with a big TV in front of us and we watched commericals and they even had this thing where we became a bottle of beer and went through the process. With admission we got 3 beers (or Pepsi's in my case) and a bottle opener. I didn't have any regrets at all about going, it was really fun too.

For lunch we had Subway... it was so good. I don't think there are words. Then afterwards we had Ben and Jerry's. Again, so good. Um... that's about all I can think of right now and I think Guillaume wants the computer so I'll just write again whenever.

Bisous,
Chelsea

I love Brussels

Ferris Wheel

Pretty Amsterdam