Amsterdam: walks and cheese stores

Aside from a few museums Amsterdam was really relaxing and we mostly just went on walks around the city and ate delicious good food. I took a billion pictures of the amazing buildings and Joseph probably wanted to kill me, but was nice and just let me be a crazy tourist...

The buildings are amazing and beautiful. 

This picture only LOOKS crooked. It's really the buildings! Cute right? (Unless the buildings like collapsed or something that would not be cute)

The park next to where we stayed 

Even the dogs were stylish--how cute are those little shoes?

And finally, we went to a cheese store! OMG the cheese was so good! I ate so much but I could not help myself... I got some for my Dad because I knew he would love it. I wish I could have boughten/ eaten the whole store.

After five days in Amsterdam, we headed back to Frankfurt. I was actually pretty ready to head back- we had been traveling for two weeks and six days -not that anyone was counting :) There was lots of dirty laundry- we had a washer/dryer in Prague, but mostly we did laundry in the sink... so yeah we needed a washer, stat! We had bought tickets back to Frankfurt for 6:30, but decided to go at 4:30 instead and were assured that it was fine. Yeah, it wasn't. We got booted off the train and had to wait for the next train at some random station in the middle of nowhere, then our train was delayed and we ended up getting back an hour later... it was kinda a nightmare. But honestly that was the worst thing that happened to us on the whole trip so I really can't complain too much!

We rolled back into Wiesbaden around 1am Tuesday morning and then it was over. :( I would love it do it all again... it was amazing, start to (admittedly somewhat rocky) finish.

Amsterdam: food and snow

The next day we headed over to the Van Gogh Museum, which seems to be a pretty standard thing to do in Amsterdam. I will say I will not really that impressed with it. Yes, there were lots of Van Gogh paintings (and some by other famous painters too), but it was super expensive, so crowded and really loud (because it has an "open" floor plan, all the noise echoed I swear it was like being in a high school gymnasium). Maybe I was jaded because I had been to some really amazing, not crowded museums, but overall was unimpressed. Luckily lunch that day was amazing, so it sort of made things better.

While we were in the Van Gogh museum it started snowing hardcore:

But strangely it was still pretty warm out, about 100x better then Berlin, thankfully.

Note my adorable Amsterdam hat. One of the little puffs fell off though :(

Then as we walked back to our hotel we happened to walk by a grocery store that had a slanted roof- which about a billion kids were using for sledding! How awesome is that! And their sleds were so awesome, too-

How cute are those kids? It made ME want to sled...but we couldn't find a store to buy a sled at-unfortunately. 

Amsterdam

Amsterdam started off amazing, because our train ride was amazing! It was only around $50 each for us to go from Berlin to Amsterdam, and we had our own little booth to sleep in. It was totally great. What was NOT so totally great was the Amsterdam tram system. Confusing, much? The building is gorgeous but there are A lines, and B lines and 1-5 lines, and if you want a map or to ask a question you have to pay for it.... greeattt.

Amsterdam train station

So, after navigating that cluster of confusion... we I decided never to ride on it again (till we had to go back to the train station). So we walked around and obviously were super impressed by the delicacies that were offered:

Pop tarts, twinkies and apple jacks. That is what America has to offer the world in terms of food :)

But I guess even more interesting was all the wooden shoes

I officially found a pair of shoes that I can't love! My Mom will be so proud. I did however buy ONE wooden shoe (a little one) as a souvenir. It's pretty cute actually.

I was also obsessed with all the buildings (as usual). Seriously so cute...

This picture is so Amsterdam to me. Canals, and bikes. 

We also went to the Anne Frank Museum on our first day, which was really neat and maybe I cried a little bit... I always feel so bad for her Dad, Otto, who survived the war only to find out all his family had died. There was also a nice exhibition on Anne Frank's Mom, who gets somewhat of a bad rap in her diary. It was nice to see a different view of her.