Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Amsterdam

I have pondered how I was going to do this because I have SOOOOO many photos (1289 to be exact). I have decided I will do a post for each city (the garden in Holland will get it's own post) and put a few (meaning, quite a few) highlight photos in the body of the post along with my witty/informative comments. On the final Paris post, I will add a link to the Picasa album(s) with all the pictures (good and bad) if you feel the need to take a look. So here we go!


Bikes, oh SO many bikes! This is the bike parking lot near the train station. If you look you can see it is similar to a parking garage. It extended very long and had at least one underground level.....Navigating Amsterdam was a whole new experience, you had to be very aware of your surroundings. Bikes definitely have the right of way in this town!

A typical canal

The awesome little church, De Papegaai, was hidden in plain sight. This church had to be tucked away among the other buildings back when Catholicism was illegal.


The floating flower market! Oh this was so cool and made me LONG to live in a place where I could have a REAL garden!
No. Comment. Needed.

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Canal Tour

More--FYI (Mom this is for you) these are called Gables. There are a few main types: The Spout Gable, the Neck or Bottle Gable, the Clock Gable, the Bell Gable and the Step Gable. I have no idea which is which but those are the types.


Aside from the neat canal tour we also visited the Van Gogh museum and the Rijksmuseum. The Van Gogh was very neat, just being in the presence of such important pieces was amazing however, we both really enjoyed the Rijksmuseum a little more. The Rembrandt collection was spectacular with a few beautiful Vermeer's thrown in and a side of beautiful Asian style blue and white pottery. It was wonderful! We also went to a wonderful Indonesian restaurant as well as a traditional Dutch restaurant where we enjoyed a traditional Dutch meal, Stampot. 

And of course, we enjoyed plenty of the local drink:



We also went to the AMAZING Keukenhof Garden in Holland, but as I mentioned before, that deserves it's very own post. 

2 comments:

susan m hinckley said...

Fantastic! Amsterdam is just wonderful -- I only wish I could have spent days instead of minutes in the VanGogh museum. Did you visit the Anne Frank house?

I can't wait to see the rest of your posts! Feel free to post as many of the 1289 photos as you'd like. For some of us, it's the closest we're gonna' get to Europe for a long time.

Amanda Cheniae said...

I loved Amsterdam! We didn't make it over to the Anne Frank house unfortunately. There were many things that we missed because there was just not enough time! Trying to squeeze 4 countrys in 2 weeks makes for a pretty packed schedule!!