Amsterdam Pt. 2

I wanted to make Saturday more productive than our Friday was - not to discount the magical Heineken experience, however - and do more touristy things. We started off with a three-hour walking tour of the city that went all around the central island and canals. As mentioned in the last post, there was a good two inches of powder on the ground but the roads and bridges had all turned to compact ice since the evening before. It made for a very slow-going and occasionally sloppy walking tour for the forty or so people that went. We went through the red light district, saw the Olde Kerk (Old Church), old ports and weigh stations, New Kerk (New Church), and a host of other old buildings significant to Amsterdam history. The tour guide was very charismatic and had a bunch of good funny stories about Amsterdam. After the tour, I followed him to his favorite pub for Heinekens and a traditional Dutch "stompokt" sausage and mashed potatoes dish. I was in the mood for something cheap and filling, and since this was all you can eat and included a half-pint, it fulfilled both of those things.

After dinner, I met back up with Cameron and Lauren to go to the Anne Frank house. The house was never damaged during the war because Amsterdam had no real resistance to the initial Nazi occupation and wasn't a major battleground when the allies arrived like Eindhoven was. The building stayed intact and, although the Nazis removed all the furniture from the two-story attic annex where the Franks and four others lived, the rest of it is exactly intact. For instance, the bathroom and kitchen fixtures are still there and one wall still bears a bunch of pencil marks charting Anne and Margot's growth. It was a very humbling experience, but thankfully it didn't go too far into depth on the death camps the family all ended up in. It was more sad to see Otto Frank's post-war interviews. He was the only survivor out of the eight hideaways and was the one that published Anne's diary and worked to preserve the house.

The Anne Frank house definately needed a follow-up activity to boost the spirits, so after Cameron and Lauren got a bite to eat, we met up with the other girls and some Clemson University kids we met the day before at the Heineken plant. We all went down to a different section of the city than we'd been before and participated in a pub crawl. I'd never done one before, so although it was pricy at 18€, it was a good experience. We got back to the hotel, packed for the morning, and went to bed around 3 with an early start ahead of us. We left the hostel at 7:30, walked to the Central Station, rode a train to Amstelstation, and got back on our bus, getting back into Paris about 5pm here. It was definately good to be home, good to have all my stuff again, good to have internet access, but most of all, good to stop the money bleeding that Amsterdam entailed. But, I guess you're only young and in Amsterdam once, so oh well.