Amsterdam!

Amsterdam

The weekend of August 24-26th we spent the weekend in Amsterdam. We loved it! Amsterdam is so beautiful and we had absolutely perfect weather. We stayed in a cute hotel in the museum quarter and we'd highly recommend. While the rooms at the Piet Hein were pretty small, the hotel had everything we needed, was in a great location (10 minute walk to major museums), and the rooms are very affordably priced. I was actually already in Amsterdam for work that Friday (yes I have returned to the working world!) ...so Shaun trained up and met me. It is about a 4 hour train ride via the ICE train from the Frankfurt main train station. We were also very fortunate as our friends Kevin & Cindy were also in town from Baltimore, so we met up and spent most of the weekend meandering around the town together.

Saturday we visited the Rijksmuseum. We highly recommend the audiotour which included hidden meanings of the paintings..and ended up really enjoying the museum. I was excited to see the paintings by Vermeer as I read the book Girl with a Pearl Earring not long ago. It was actually very cool to see the original Rembrant masterpiece "The Night Watch." Next, it was off to the Van Gogh museum. We timed this one pretty bad as it was VERY crowded. We still enjoyed walking through and viewing the original Van Gogh paintings.

Next we grabbed some lunch and milled around town taking in the sites like Dam Square, the Bloemenmarkt, and of course the infamous red light district! A friend of ours that lives in Amsterdam was kind enough to walk us down one very interesting alley! Saturday evening we visited the Anne Frank Huis and this was also a very cool and moving museum. It is amazing that so many people lived in such a small space for such a long period of time. As most of you probably know, the Franks were ultimately betrayed to the Nazis...and to this day they do not who betrayed them. The bookcase hiding the staircase and the rooms the familes stayed in are still intact. Of course I managed to trip over the stove while we were there and we're pretty sure i moved it a few inches...hopefully that wasn't original!! We finished Saturday off with a great meal by the water and enjoyed watching the boats ride up and down the canal barely avoiding collision at times.

Sunday, we said goodbye to Cindy, Kevin & Nick over breakfast and then Shaun and I decided to be adventurous. We went on a bike tour with Mike's Bike Tours of Amsterdam and the surrounding countryside. The tour took us through the city and into the country where we saw a windmill (named Bonita) and a farm where they made cheese and clogs. So...not having been on a bike in 10 years is always a good thing when you do a bike tour! In Amsterdam no less! There are actually more bikes in Amsterdam than people...we were totally amazed when we first arrived -there are BIKES everywhere. The tour was great, but the first 15 minutes through the city were rather stressful for me! The tour also took us through some of Amsterdam's beautiful parks including Vondelpark and Beatrixpark. Somewhere along the tour we were able to see the Amsterdam Sheraton which is where John Lenin and Yoko Ono spent their honeymoon. From the street you can see the peace messages they left on the windows from when they invited the press up to their honeymoon suite!

Sunday night Shaun and I parrted ways ..I headed back to the airport towards my client and Shaun headed back to Frankfurt. We had a great weekend...but were absolutely drained! Please click the album above to see our pictures.

(Good tip - for most of the museums you can advance purchase tickets online...this saved us lots of time as the lines to get in to some museums were quite long!)