Day 1:

May 22nd, 2025

I woke up at 4:50 am to catch the bus to the airport to make the 7 am flight! I don't know remember why I booked such an early flight haha! The bus ride and flight went by smoothly and quickly. Once I deboarded from the plane, I walked directly to the train station and caught the NS train into the city for my 10 am walking tour with Daniel (Australian but moved to Amsterdam at the age of 10, he said he didn't have an accent, but I could hear it!). Check out this beautiful photo of the river once I arrived in town and my starting point for the tour!

1 / 2
Loading image...

The tour started with some history: Amsterdam is a young city in the eyes of Europe, only about 750 years old. Farmers and fisherman, who didn't want to be ruled by Kings and Queens were the only people willing to move into what was considered uninhabitable land in the Netherlands 750 years ago. Since, Amsterdam is below sea level, mostly made of peat swamps and floods frequently, people set up shop on the beaches (high dunes). As time passed and the population began to grow, they went in search of ways to reclaim the flooded land. This is where the iconic windmills come from. The windmills were created to pump water out of rivers, lakes or flooded land. As they reclaimed land and had more working people, they built many dams and dykes to protect against the flooding. There have been major floods from the sea as recently as 1953. In 1927, they started building their largest dam and highway combo blocking the North Sea at 32 km long.

Since land came at a premium it led to some interesting taxation on houses, which caused houses to be very small/narrow. Houses were taxed on 3 criteria, the width of the house, the number of steps leading up to the front door-step, and the number of windows in the house. See the smallest house in Amsterdam below. It's only about 6 feet wide.

1 / 2
Loading image...

One of the other interesting features on houses in Amsterdam are the hooks at the very top. In the past, Amsterdam had a thriving spice trade economy (spices were worth more than gold at the time) and to prevent spices from being damaged during floods they would be stored in the attics. The problem was houses were too narrow to transport things up to the attic, so they would use the hooks on the outside of the house to lift the bins of spices up to and down from the attic. Since spices were so lucrative, people would risk their lives on boats trying to transport spices to foreign countries to sell as it would set them up financially for life. The photo below is a building that once belonged to one of the rich spice trades (the company symbol is still on the doors of the building, VOC - Dutch East Indian Spice Company).

1 / 3
Loading image...

Amsterdam also made an excellent trading hub due to all of its rivers running through the city, boats were a lot faster than other modes of transport at the time. Churches and red-light district zones ended up in the city center near the trading hubs. At the time the government turned a blind eye to the red-light districts as they figured it contributed to more spending from the traders that they could tax. The churches were always close to the red-light district to provide easy access afterwards for traders to go repent for their sins. The churches were also annoyed they weren't getting any money from all the trade going on, so they started requiring payment for peoples sins to be forgiven. Then, they figured why not let the traders prepay for forgiveness before they went to the red-light district!

1 / 4
Loading image...

In the Amsterdam flag and everywhere around Amsterdam, there were three X's. Our tour guide explained that these were rooted in Christianity. People believed that the X's represented fire, floods, and the black plague (all the struggles for people in Amsterdam) but their true meaning is still unknown!

In modern day Amsterdam there are 700 bridges over the various rivers. During our tour, one of the older ladies started falling down the steep steps to one of the river walkways, but another member of the tour noticed, ran over, and pushed her back upright.

After the tour, I was feeling pretty tired, so I sat down to look for restaurants and two lovely older ladies from the tour asked me to lunch. We had a wonderful time talking about life, politics, and everything under the sun! They were both retired from an Island in the States near Seattle.

1 / 2
Loading image...

When lunch was over, I headed to my hostel which was a 45 minutes bus ride out of town but very cheap so worth the travel time. I dropped all of my items off, then went right back into town. I had an opera, ballet show in the evening.

Right next to the ballet building, I found a lovely café/restaurant called Eetcafé Blauwburg, where I had a local beer, ginger beer, french fries in a cone, and Chicken covered in a Satay sauve (with pickles + cassava crackers).

Loading image...

The opera ballet I went to see was the Story of Anansi (a spider, children's stories I think?) from the Akan religion. The performance when through many stories. Most of the dancing was a ballet-contemporary hybrid except for a random hip hop dance break in the middle of the performance haha! I've included some professional photos from their promotional materials, so you can see how colourful and cool the performance was! I wish I could have gone back a second time to catch everything that was happening.

1 / 8
Loading image...

Day 2: May 23rd

In the morning, I hopped out of bed at the hostel, packed everything into my locker, then grabbed the bus to the city. First things first, I dropped into a breakfast restaurant to get the famed mini Dutch pancakes for breakfast with Nutella and fruit! Very tasty and there was no one at the restaurant, so I got to sit outside all by myself haha! It was a chilly day (14 degrees) so I was wearing all the layers I had brought since I was used too much warmer weather in Saint-Genis-Pouilly.

Loading image...

After eating, I took a nice walk down to the Rijksmuseum, where I met up with Dave (Theuerkauf) and his partner, Natasha. We took a quick, we need coffee break, at the museums' café before starting. We looked at old swords, old guns, an airplane, artwork, and other miscellaneous things (it was Amsterdam everything museum). We had a lot of fun making jokes, catching up, and imaging what life might have been like when looking at the various old objects and paintings.

1 / 9
Loading image...

The most popular painting in the museum is the Night Watch, but it is currently being restored. It's a 5-year project of stripping the varnish and adding a new varnish. Some people wanted elements that have disappeared from the painting to be added back, but that was not approved.

1 / 2
Loading image...

Time flew by in the museum and lunch was upon us. We went for lunch together where we got some traditional meat ball/sausage and potato mash with seasonal vegetables' thing (see picture). We ended up getting both a meatball and sausage because our waiter said the meat ball was better than the sausage, so we had to try both. I also got a tasty ginger beer. The waiter was very jovial and cracked lots of jokes. At the end, Dave and Natasha surprised me by paying for lunch, which was very nice of them! Also, important to note was it was Dave's birthday today, so it was fun to be celebrating it with him in Amsterdam!

1 / 2
Loading image...

At the end of lunch, we decided to book we booked a boat tour and I did some quick research to try and find a good one! At the boat, nobody showed up for our time slot, so we got a whole hour tour to ourselves. We were in a small electric boat with a free glass of wine and a nice young guy studying in Amsterdam who told us many facts about the city (The seine is about 5 meters deep, so the subway can go underneath, many of the walls on the seine are crumbling and currently a lot of work is being done to try and repair them). We were very lucky, and it stopped raining for most of our boat tour, then started again when we were done!

Loading image...

Also, We took a short journey to the Lego store! Then we went for supper at a Ramen place, got the local Amsterdam ramen dish and chatted for another couple hours!

1 / 3
Loading image...

Day 3

For my last day in the city, I didn't have to fly out until late, so I packed in as many things as I could!

At breakfast, I bought a StroopWaffel and a sausage roll. While eating, I wasn't paying attention and the caramel syrup inside the StroopWaffel went all over my clothes. This must be a common occurrence because the StroopWaffel came with wipes which helped me solve my predicament! I also passed the rubber duck store which I didn't realize was a thing.

1 / 3
Loading image...

Since the weather was beautiful, I went to the Amsterdam Park/Zoo. I spent a couple of hours wandering in the beautiful park as well as visiting the butterfly museum, reptile museum, seeing lots of endangered birds, seeing elephants for the first time, monkeys, and more. The park mostly focused on helping endangered species so the animals all had large living areas. Additionally, I spent some time in the adjacent bacteria museum, which had many interactive exhibits to see how bacteria functions in all aspects of our lives. There was also a cool exhibit showing ants hard at work.

1 / 13
Loading image...

Lunchtime! I ate Indonesian food which I can't remember having in recent memory. I was so early that there was only one food option prepared, but it was still really tasty, and I got another ginger beer!

Loading image...

Afterwards, I went to the BodyWorks museum, a museum that had many exhibits of people expertly dissected to show our different biological systems. The theme of the exhibit was the experience of happiness in human life. I won't show any pictures of the bodies or say anymore for fear of it being too much for some people, but if your curious you can look up their website. They do exhibits all over the world. Here's a happiness photo though!

Loading image...

Time in Amsterdam was running out, so I spent my last 30 minutes at a smoothie place and just sat and listened to music while letting the whole trip set in, then I took the train back to the airport and flew home!

Loading image...