LOCATION:
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Not only was I excited to see Amsterdam, I was excited to see Kyle! It is a fairly quick flight from New York so he decided to join me for a weekend and got in Thursday morning. One of the first things we did - find a bar!
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| Who is manlier, Kyle or the caveman? |
After some delicious beer and a delicious burger (the best in Europe, according to tripadvisor!), we headed out for - yes - more beer! Though it is a bit touristy and I don't really like their beer, I wanted to see the Heineken brewery. It did indeed turn out to be very touristy, but was still a fun time. The thing I appreciated the most from the tour was the importance of branding (um, hello marketing student). There were three generations of Heinekens, but only the third placed an importance on marketing and introduced the "smiling e's" which are now a part of the logo. The experience was also full of interactive stations including a DJ booth, a make-your-own music video station, and a beer pouring simulation game. I rarely beat Kyle at anything, so I was extra proud of my near perfect beer pouring skills compared with his sub-par score.
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| See the "smiling e's" in the logo? |
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| The tour, of course, included lots of samples. |
One of the things I was most excited about seeing in Holland was the tulips. Tulips are one of my favorite flowers, and the largest garden in the Netherlands opened the day before we arrived. I had daydreams of renting bikes and cycling through fields of color that stretched as far as you could see.
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| What I was hoping to bike through. |
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| What I was hoping the gardens would look like. |
Clearly I didn't do enough research, and late March is not exactly prime tulip season. Though the garden we went to did have greenhouses and exhibition halls filled with beautiful flowers, the garden grounds were not what I had dreamed of. It was cold and mostly brown, but we tried to make the best of it.
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| Inside, beautiful flowers and color! |
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| Look, a teeny tiny tulip! |
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After the rather disappointing flower experience, we were hoping for better luck with a football match we decided to go to. This was a national match - Holland against Estonia. The match we were going to was a 2014 World Cup qualifier so we went expecting excitement. We certainly weren't disappointed; the final score was 3-0 with Holland for the win! Two games in one week, am I an official football fan now?
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| We got orange scarfs to try and fit in. |
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The next morning we went on a WWII history walk. I finished reading The Diary of Anne Frank about a week ago, and am currently reading another book about an American family living in Hitler's Berlin, so WWII history is really fascinating to me right now. Though the two hour walk left me probably the coldest I have been so far on this trip, it was really interesting. Our guide was a journalist-turned-historian who was born just after the war, so he had a lot of information to share. He held up pictures of what certain locations looked like during or just after the war, and some of the monuments he pointed out were very moving - including a monument to a Jewish boys orphanage where none of the 300 boys taken ever returned, and Hollands Auschwitz memorial consisting of six broken mirrors on the ground which reflect the broken sky because - according to the artist - when remembering the Holocaust the sky will always be broken.
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| The only picture from the walk, and I don't even remember what this place was! |
Overall Amsterdam was super fun, and seeing Kyle was super super fun! It was cold and windy while we were there, but we made the best of it. Amsterdam is pretty small and I feel like I sort of have a feel for it, but all of those canals resulted in lots of lost wandering. I am sad Kyle had to head back to New York, but I am excited to continue my travels to Belgium! Up next, Brugge!
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