A Day In Amsterdam

We arrived in Amsterdam really late and went straight to our hostel to do laundry and go to bed.

The next morning we woke up early and walked to meet up with a group that offers free tours.  The tour was really interesting. Aly, our tour guide, took us around the city explaining Amsterdam’s history from the founding to current day. She told us how Amsterdam got to be such a liberal city where so many things are tolerated.

 

 Amsterdam is one of the few cities untouched by WWII so the architecture is mostly original. We found it very interesting that many of the houses are leaning sideways and forward. The sideways leaning is due to the foundation being built on sand. The reason they lean forward is a more bizarre story. People were taxed on the width of their houses and therefore built them very narrow making the staircases steep and skinny. To get furniture into the houses they constructed pully systems to pull the furniture in through the windows. The problem was the furniture would scrape up the front of the house in the process. To solve this problem, the people of the city started building their houses to lean forward. Many years later they discovered that lengthening the pole of the pully system could solve this problem in a much simpler way.

After the tour we went to see the Anne Frank house. The museum is connected to the actual annex where Anne and her family hid for two years. There were eight people hiding in the small area, which was hidden behind a bookcase above Otto Frank’s company. The Nazis removed all the furniture after the family’s hiding place was betrayed. Otto, the only surviving member of the family asked that the rooms never be refurnished. The museum had many personal belongings along with pictures and videos of close friends of the Franks as well as Otto himself. Visiting the museum was very unsettling to imagine what Anne and her family went through.

After our busy afternoon we worked up quite an appetite. We found a cute corner café that served delicious mini pancakes!

 

On our way to the train station Jessy stopped for a popular snack in the Netherlands, a cone of French fries.

Our next stop was Berlin and we had a long way to go so we booked a night train.  We got a couchette which is a small room with six beds in it, 3 stacked on top of each other.  At first, they looked very uncomfortable but after we settled in we realized how tired we were and fell right to sleep!