Amsterdam Day 1! I said "this is so pretty!" at least 100 times

May 12, 2024

Amsterdam Day 1! I said "this is so pretty!" at least 100 times

Another train traveling day today! But we actually got seats on this one, yay! When we arrived in Amsterdam we hopped on the tram and went to our hotel where we speedily dropped off our luggage and then got started with our plans for the day! We are always very go go go which can be fun but also exhausting haha. Amsterdam is sooo beautiful though! And it was sunny and beautiful and there are canals and bikes everywhere. You do have to be careful because pedestrians < bikers. They WILL run you over. I did catch a precious moment between a brother and his younger sister on a bike ride - he was steadying her and making sure she didn’t fall and it was so cute.

Our first stop was the Rijksmuseum which is pronounced like Rikes museum. Dutch is such an interesting language to me because there’s a lot of words that you can understand if you speak English but it’s just spelled weird and then there’s a lot more words that make no sense and just look like somebody mixed up alphabet soup and grabbed random letters to create their words. Like this:

Anyways the Rijksmuseum was really cool. There were some Rembrandt and Vermeer paintings there and then also a lot of other wonderful art by not as famous artists. There also was this incredible library with soo many books that was beautiful.

After the museum you can exit into the courtyard/garden area so of course that’s what we did. It was beautiful and so wonderful to just soak in some sun after all of the grey dreary weather we’ve been experiencing.

After the museum it was time to head to our group dinner for the week! We got to go to this Balinese/Indonesian restaurant. We learned about how there is really good Indonesian food in Amsterdam because of the Dutch East India company bringing back spices. It was so delicious, there was so much color and flavor and it was the best I’ve eaten all week. Yum!