Amsterdam: We Came Full Circle

We arrived at our hotel in Amsterdam, got food and ate lunch under the shade of a windmill! Then we went to a flea market and enjoyed all the knick-knacks of the Netherlanders. We wanted to go see Anne Frank's house but there were so many tourists we couldn't really get close. We didn't get tickets ahead of time so we couldn't go on a tour and I truly wished we could have. Amsterdam was very different in August than it was in May. There were a million tourists everywhere. We ducked into a cheese museum to get some relief from the tourists and it was really great! They had samples of every type of Gouda imaginable and we happily tasted them all with little toothpicks.

We found an awesome drawing of a windmill. It is a sketch that says, "Molen, Amstel" on the bottom. It was so neat to find it because Amstel is where we stayed when we first came to the Netherlands.

Glorious cheese!

A delicious calzone biger than Naomi's head! Chris and the gang in front of the Anne Frank house, also being blinded by the sun's reflection off a trash can. 

Chris and Naomi playing a game in the grocery store. Also, notice the eggs on the shelf to the right. They aren't in the refrigerated section. No eggs were put in a fridge, that we saw. And these eggs are soooo good! They are so creamy and cheesy that it took a minute to get used to them but they are definitely more tasty than the ones in America.

After touring the city for a bit we wanted to go to Haarlem and see Corrie Tin Boom's house. I put the address in the GPS and it took us 45 min in the opposite direction. By the time we got to wherever it was we were, it was too late to drive back to Haarlem and get in a tour. We were pretty upset but it couldn't be helped. So we grabbed dinner near our hotel. After dinner we headed back to the hotel to try and pack our bags smaller and get rid of unneccesary weight. One funny story: when we arrived at our hotel the room had trash on the desk and the beds weren't made like a maid had done it and towels were on the floor in the bathroom. When we were heading out to get food we mentioned this to the front desk and they said, "Oh, ok." When we got back the room was all clean and perfect. It was funny because, in America they would have been very apologetic and may have given us a free stay or something. Europeans aren't too big on customer service we noticed. Just differences in culture :)