Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Amsterdam

Haveyoueverseenawordspelledlikethis? Welcome to Dutch 101. Or my other favorite example, the word penmanship,nor as they say it in Dutch, shipenman.  Or so it seems, right.  I have thought this in the past and it was really confirmed while I've been in Amsterdam... Is that actually a real language? Because I am not trying to be mean, but it sounds fake. if you have never heard Dutch, you must YouTube right now!

Let's discuss Amsterdam and my sleeping habits to begin. First, I no longer sleep. Greys and Twilight must have planted this idea that sleep is not a real thing because I no longer do it or need it. Usually, I am a solid 8 hour person, as of late, I sleep 5 or maybe 6 and I'm done.  Also, I don't really drink that much water and so I nevere pee. I think maybe I am just finally becoming a true Burkhalter. Dry skin included.

Okay, so back o Amsterdam. First of all, come here! It's stunning, absolutely gorgeous. The people are rediculouly nice, they all speak English perfectly, which makes me feel like me pretend Dutch is not far from the truth, and this is definitely the place for someone with a 32 in inseam and size 40 feet.  In Hawaii, when you go to try on shoes, the sample size is usually s 6 or 7. Here. It's a 9.5.... Just my size! Went to buy pants yesterday, and they had a size 29x32.  Who has that?!

The main square here is called Amsterdam Dam or just Dam. I prefer to say Amsterdam Dam. This is just one of the many, many fun words to say. To be honest, they all sound funny.

So the only train that we could get on from Paris left at 7pm and arrived in Amsterdam at 10:30pm. I was worried that wasn't going to be safe. It was just the opposite. I have no clue what sort of timetable these people operate on, but things were in full swing at 10:30 at night. The only thing missing was the sun. After a small bit of confusion, we found some wifi, found out hotel, yes we should have probably looked up where the hotel was before we got there, we hopped on a tram and rode to muslim neighborhood.


Really quick, this is finally a picture of the storage unit. Here we are packing for Amsterdam.



Okay, so we make it to the hotel in Amsterdam which is on the outskirts of the city, but at the last minute, it was the cheapest one and it didn't have bedbugs like the hostel that I initally booked that Lauren nixed. Probably a wise decision. It was a Christian hostel in the red light district. For 20 bucks more, we got this hotel. Which turned out to be amazing. Usually, rooms in europe are tiny. We had the worlds largest room, like the size of my living room in Hawaii for those of you who know and it was on the top floor overlooking the city! Way cool!

So we stayed there. Immediately, we were both so tired and went to sleep. BTW this is a very common theme for us.

The next morning, we woke up, walked through what turned out to be a very pleasant neighborhood and headed for AmsterdamDam. First question, what are the dutch known for? Clogs, windmills, and cheese!

So we found some cheese!

Are sampling everything, we selected a fine herbed cheese. We bought some bread, plastic knives and sat by a canal and ate it.\

So Amsterdam is stunningly beautiful. Amazing.

Our next stop was to the Anne Frank House. So we walked there. It was stunning. Saw this on the way.


Oh look....

So this is the outside of the Anne Frank House. You can wait in line forever or you can just by your tickets online. We did that. We were a bit early so we went to a canalside cafe to get a coffee.



Here's the cafe. What a terrible view.




So, if you look closely, you can see a boat is coming under the bridge. The boats are huge and the canals are so so narrow. You'll see what I mean later.





So close! Okay, that was Amsterdam part one. Get ready for some more!

No comments:

Post a Comment