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| On the balcony of their room |
My mom arrived to the hotel before 9:00 am this morning, the highest level museum passes in hand, ready for her five days with the girls. I still needed to get our laundry done before I could turn them over completely, so I packed my backpack full of all of our dirty clothes and walked it over to a laundromat. They did the whole load, washed and folded for 10 euro...a price I might be tempted to pay in my normal life to not have to fold clothes. But, they told me it wouldn't be ready until 1:00 pm which is later than I intended to leave Amsterdam. I went back to the hotel and joined the girls and my mom at the hotel breakfast before they left to meet up for a walking tour my mom had scheduled for them.
LIZ:
I was thrilled to learn that the Van Gogh museum is actually opened Mondays – it was the perfect way for me to pass the time before the laundry was done. And, now I don’t have to sneak back into Amsterdam this week. Melina (the Brazilian from the train) said she spent six hours in the Van Gogh museum and cried seeing his paintings in person. I wasn't quite that moved, but did really enjoy being surrounded by his art for two hours. I have always loved his art and left with a renewed appreciation for his work and for him.
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| My hostel is cuter than it looks here |
Then back to the laundromat, to
the hotel to distribute and repack, and off to the train station to move into
my home for the next five nights – Hello I’m a Local Hostel in Haarlam, a
20-minute train ride from Amsterdam. Just off the train and walking to the hostel, I knew I had made a good choice. The
town is full of beautiful canals and bridges. The hostel is very hip (a word they use often), groovy (the
wifi password is “love you”) and young.
I am in a 8-person bunk bed room that so far has just four of us in
there – me and three young women in their 20s -- two from small towns in Holland
and one from Korea just finishing two months of traveling on her own (and anxious to get home).
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| Market Square view of the Grote Kerk Church |
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| SO windy! |
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| The bridge rotates to open for boats |
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| closed after boat - people waiting to cross |
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| During one of my wrong turns I was delighted to see that most of these boats actually had people eating dinner on them...some clearly lived on them. |
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| mushrooms! |
I had some trouble finding the final x on my map but was not willing to give up easily as I had been told really good pizza was served there. I was set on finding it...and not until I made the correct turn into this little hidden gem did I remember that that the pizza was not her point in sending me there, it was that it is a little beach spot with tables and chairs on the sand. The pizza was an afterthought in her telling of it..it was just the thing that stuck in my mind. It was too windy to sit outside (though the Dutch didn't think so) so I did my first solo dinner reading a book on a comfy reading chair inside and eating a mushroom pizza - perhaps the biggest benefit of being alone!
GRANDMA AND THE GIRLS (as told by Julia):
While my mom did some much needed laundry (thanks mom!), Rachel, Grandma, and I went into the center of town to meet up with our tour guide for a walking tour of the city. We got there a little before the 12:00 meeting time, so decided to check out a traditional Dutch cheese shop, which to my delight was just many different types of Gouda - my favorite type of cheese! We got some bite-sized squares for a later snack, and walked across the street to the stock exchange building where we were to meet our tour group.
Rafael, our Portugese tour guide, who moved to Amsterdam to study music and play the guitar (a fact Rachel was able to pick up on immediately based on the state of his nails), was incredibly knowledgeable about every aspect of the city and spoke nearly perfect English. Luckily enough our promised "small group tour" ended up to be just the three of us, as no one else had signed up for that time period! The tour was a wonderful way to start off this part of the trip, made even better by the fact that it was personalized, with plenty of time to ask all the questions we had.
By the time it was over, we were all pretty hungry, and very cold, so we went over to the Ivy & Bros, a hip little place Rachel had found earlier, for a lunch of hot tea, vegetable soup, and grilled cheese sandwiches (made with even more Gouda!). With no other reservations or specific plans made for the day, we decided to return to a place Rafael had pointed out that my grandma had visited and loved the last time she was in Amsterdam a few years ago. Our Lord in the Attic is a hidden Catholic church built in the 17th century when the open practice of Catholicism was banned after the people of Amsterdam pushed Spanish influence (and the Catholic Church) out of Amsterdam and became a Protestant country. Our tour guide pointed out that, while in most other places at the time, Catholics were imprisoned or killed for practicing, Amsterdam allowed its Catholics to continue practicing as long as it was hidden from the rest of the world -- an early start to Amsterdam's open-minded attitude, now extended to drugs and prostitution. This necessity for hidden services led to many of these churches tucked into normal living spaces and made to look like every other building on the outside, while on the inside it is a huge open space spanning the height of three floors, and decorated with beautiful religious icons and paintings.
Rachel and I both really enjoyed the church and the museum around it, and so took more time than expected, leaving us without any time to go to the other sites we were planning on visiting. Instead, we decided to use one of the transportation tickets included in the Amsterdam passes my grandma had bought us to take an hour-long canal boast trip with a guided audio tour. The city is really very beautiful from the canals, and the guide was surprisingly thorough and gave us even more insight into the city. We have now been on guided tours on three modes of transportation in two days - bikes, feet, and boat!
After getting back, Grandma was starting to feel the jet lag, so we took the tram closer to our hotel and walked around to get dinner. Surprisingly, during the couple of minutes we were walking, we had three people trying to sell us stuff in Spanish! I had always though that my mom was the only one of us who looked at all Hispanic, but one of the men told us that he was certain Grandma was Mexican. We had a lovely Italian dinner and walked back to our hotel so Grandma (and Rachel and I) could get some rest before our museum day tomorrow!
While my mom did some much needed laundry (thanks mom!), Rachel, Grandma, and I went into the center of town to meet up with our tour guide for a walking tour of the city. We got there a little before the 12:00 meeting time, so decided to check out a traditional Dutch cheese shop, which to my delight was just many different types of Gouda - my favorite type of cheese! We got some bite-sized squares for a later snack, and walked across the street to the stock exchange building where we were to meet our tour group.
Rafael, our Portugese tour guide, who moved to Amsterdam to study music and play the guitar (a fact Rachel was able to pick up on immediately based on the state of his nails), was incredibly knowledgeable about every aspect of the city and spoke nearly perfect English. Luckily enough our promised "small group tour" ended up to be just the three of us, as no one else had signed up for that time period! The tour was a wonderful way to start off this part of the trip, made even better by the fact that it was personalized, with plenty of time to ask all the questions we had.By the time it was over, we were all pretty hungry, and very cold, so we went over to the Ivy & Bros, a hip little place Rachel had found earlier, for a lunch of hot tea, vegetable soup, and grilled cheese sandwiches (made with even more Gouda!). With no other reservations or specific plans made for the day, we decided to return to a place Rafael had pointed out that my grandma had visited and loved the last time she was in Amsterdam a few years ago. Our Lord in the Attic is a hidden Catholic church built in the 17th century when the open practice of Catholicism was banned after the people of Amsterdam pushed Spanish influence (and the Catholic Church) out of Amsterdam and became a Protestant country. Our tour guide pointed out that, while in most other places at the time, Catholics were imprisoned or killed for practicing, Amsterdam allowed its Catholics to continue practicing as long as it was hidden from the rest of the world -- an early start to Amsterdam's open-minded attitude, now extended to drugs and prostitution. This necessity for hidden services led to many of these churches tucked into normal living spaces and made to look like every other building on the outside, while on the inside it is a huge open space spanning the height of three floors, and decorated with beautiful religious icons and paintings.
Rachel and I both really enjoyed the church and the museum around it, and so took more time than expected, leaving us without any time to go to the other sites we were planning on visiting. Instead, we decided to use one of the transportation tickets included in the Amsterdam passes my grandma had bought us to take an hour-long canal boast trip with a guided audio tour. The city is really very beautiful from the canals, and the guide was surprisingly thorough and gave us even more insight into the city. We have now been on guided tours on three modes of transportation in two days - bikes, feet, and boat!
After getting back, Grandma was starting to feel the jet lag, so we took the tram closer to our hotel and walked around to get dinner. Surprisingly, during the couple of minutes we were walking, we had three people trying to sell us stuff in Spanish! I had always though that my mom was the only one of us who looked at all Hispanic, but one of the men told us that he was certain Grandma was Mexican. We had a lovely Italian dinner and walked back to our hotel so Grandma (and Rachel and I) could get some rest before our museum day tomorrow!
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