Musings from Mandy

This morning I again went back to the Anne Frank House and again the line was 150 people long.  B+ for effort, F for actually going to the museum.  I may try again before this week is over. There was two more museums that I had originally thought about checking out while I was here: the Hermitage and the Museum of the Resistors (or something like that about Dutch resistance to Nazi occupation).  However, this morning I was a little museum-ed out so instead I decided to just walk around and window shop, get some lunch, and then window shop some more.  I found this incredibly cool store that I would have spend a fortune in if I wasn't low on suitcase space and Euros. They had funny gag gifts (including a mustache ice cube tray) but also some really practical things like a metal trivet that you would put a hot plate on that looked like a flattened guy.  Uncle Neil would have loved it. Also, it's the second blue sky, white fluffy cloud day in a row which was really ...

Our hotel is located in the airport which means that we happen to be right next to one of the famous "I Amsterdam" signs.  It's usually crawling with people especially the ones outside the Rijksmuseum.  Last night we ate dinner at the Runway Cafe downstairs and got ice cream and on our walk back it was empty except for one girl and her mom so I had to seize the opportunity to take a super touristy picture.

Today I went to the Rijksmuseum which along with the Anne Frank House and Van Gogh Museum are the three must see museums in Amsterdam.  It didn't disappoint.  It was full of some of the most famous paintings in the world with a heavy focus on...you can probably guess...Dutch painters.  Here are a few of my favorites (they allow photography in there which I found weird). La Corniche by Monaco by Claude Monet Lighthouse in Breaking Waves by: Hendrik Willem Mesdag What's cool about this painting above is that it caught my eye from across the room and when I got close I found out it was a painting of Scheveningen where I had visited earlier in the week.   The Sea near Katjivk by: Jan Thorop My painting appreciation is pretty simple.  Give me the beach and pretty colors and I'm in.  Dark oils and people I don't know, I'm out.  This was neat.  It's huge in person (I'm a terrible judge of height but it's a lot taller than me), maybe 20 feet tall and it f...

They have these in every single rental car in the Netherlands because so many people end up in canals.  You can use it to break the window when you drive in the canal.  Thankfully, we stayed dry.

I wanted to go somewhere in Belgium while I was here and Corey recommended Brugge.  Train tickets were 80 euro round trip so we looked into a car.  I got one through AutoEuro for 60 USD.  That seemed like a great deal till we woke up this morning super hungover with no desire to do anything, but hey, we already paid for the car so we might as well get over it.  It was the kind of morning where I squeezed a closed tube of toothpaste and couldn't figure out for a solid 30 seconds why it wasn't working.  That kind of a morning. Our hotel is directly in the airport so when we went downstairs we noticed no Thrifty rental car agency.  Of course our discount car was housed off airport.  We had to wait like 20 minutes for the shuttle and we're not happy Belgian campers. We finally hit the road by the crack of noon and it took about 3 hours to get there.  It was so unbelievably beautiful.  I had to stop taking pictures because everything was so pretty...

After our travels of the day we went downtown to Amsterdam to get dinner and see the Red Light district at night.  For dinner we went to an Indian restaurant it was pretty good.  I was nervous because we were the only customers but it was pretty late and ended up being good.  I could live on garlic Naan alone. As for the Red Light District, it's pretty wild.  We got down there around 10 and walked around.  There are a couple of streets right in the middle where there are the actual girls in door windows that are lit by "red lights" and if you're interested you go up and open the door and go in and they close the curtains so if the curtain's closed you know that if the curtain's closed, don't come a knockin' I guess.  The whole thing is pretty strange. We ended up getting a ton of beers (weird Dutch thing - you can pay extra for extra cold beer which is just cruel to a girl like me AND it's pretty unusual to be specific about what beer you want, you...

Today we went to Delft.  Delft is just south of The Hague so I actually could have gone easily yesterday but didn't know it existed then. Delft is famous for Royal Delft pottery  http://www.royaldelft.com/index.asp?lang=2  which is blue and white and very pretty. We went to a museum, Museum Het Prisenhof that was really interesting.  It had a history of Delft pottery (not so interesting), a collection of paintings from Delft and the surrounding area's artists (fairly interesting) and it happens to be in the building where William I of Orange was assassinated (very interesting).  They had a lot of paintings about William and his relationship with King Phillip of Spain whom set of the rebellion that began the 80 years war that eventually led to Dutch independence. Here are a few pictures from the museum.  The first is William of Orange, then the staircase he came down when he was assassinated, and finally two bullet holes that they claim are from the shooting...