Amsterdam

Welcome to Amsterdam! Ryan and I waited until Alex was asleep and made a skeedaddle up to Amsterdam for the weekend. Don't worry, Madelyn stayed behind to watch the little feller. See next blog entry to see all the tricks she taught him while we were gone....

Soooo, we get to Amsterdam and decide that we should see the Ann Frank house.

We stood in this line

It curves around the building, and is just as long on around the corner. In case you were wondering... YES it was cold and very very breezey. My nose was frozen by the time we got in. Luckily we had some young college age whipper snappers behind us that were discussing their previous night in the Red Light district. I'm pretty sure that they were also working off the effects of visiting one of the local "coffee" shops. At least we were a entertained while we froze.

We took this picture of Ann Frank's house




We found out later that this is not the house. But rather a building later added. So let me amend the the caption. We took this picture of a building later built to hold the majority of the Ann Frank exhibit. Her real house is a couple doors down. Whoopsie. :)

As we were walking back to the hotel I spied this little boy with his grandma.

The little boy has a baby doll strapped to his chest!! AWESOME!! Now that is something you would never see in America.








The next day we decided to take a tour on the canals.


The hotel had a private boat for their guests. It was just us and one other couple. Very nice.






Here is one of the regular boats that tour the canal.


Eeekkk! Look at all those people crammed in there. Our boat was wayyyy better and they knew it. In fact they were so jealous that they drove by really close and really fast...... and.......




Ha Ha Ryan got wet


That there is some cold water. Still worth it though... our boat is still better.





We saw lots of cool stuff, most of which I can't remember, so here are a couple of shots.


These are 7 identical bridges all lined up down a canal. The picture doesn't do it justice, it was really pretty.

There are house boats that line some of the canals. Here is a look in one of those boats. These folks are pretty tidy. Some boats had garbage strewn everywhere, and dirty dishes in the sink for everyone to see. I don't think I could live on a houseboat where hundreds of people pass by everyday and look in your windows. Some "house boats" were nothing more that a flat bardge with a tent and some lawn chairs. CRAZY!!

We tried to take a picture Shawn and Ann style.

Shawn must have some crazy long arms for his body, cause we could never seem to get as good of an angle or picture as they are able to get.





We then went to the Van Gogh Museum. Can't take pictures in there so unless you wanted to see the massively long line we waited in to get into the museum... well you'll just have to take our word on it that we were there. Tip for future, always check to see if you can purchase tickets online. Almost all attractions have this option and you don't have to wait in the cold to get in. Then on to the flower market, which should be really called the flower bulb and trinket market.

Of course we strolled through the Red Light District. It was rainey and cold so we dind't hang out there very long. Funny... they didn't let us take pictures there either. To bad, we were thinking of some great Christmas card captions to go with those pics.

Oh, and we went back to the Ann Frank house.

This is the real Ann Frank house.

Now we have to go home to Rotterdam. See ya.