We left after work on Thursday and drove six hours to Nurenberg, Germany for the night. This was one of the first times we have found a hotel that accomodates us with 2 double beds, so we had a pretty inexpensive layover. We drove the remaining six hours early Friday morning, arriving Amsterdam around 1:00. We drove straight to the Anne Frank house, found a parking space right around the corner, and took the tour. I had been before, but it was the first visit for Heather. It is amazing to think what went on just a few years ago, relatively speaking. Katie asked a lot more questions and we were a little more accomodating trying to explain the situation of that period in history (certainly more so than when we visited Auschwitz a couple of years ago), adjusting the message to her understanding.
We walked from the Anne Frank house to the Hotel Pulitzer, just down the road, although we did not stay there. It is a beautiful hotel, made up of 25 restored 17th/18th century canal houses and has an art gallery contained in the gardens.
We continued walking towards the center of town where we walked through a main square and visited the "Old Church" which sits just on the outskirts of the famous red light district.
Just so Heather could see what this was all about, she took a stroll just one block in and was shocked at how this part of town displays its "wares". I saw it 10 years ago and didn't really feel like seeing it again, so I just took pictures of the girls (before I realized that I was also photographing some outdoor public urinals...nice).
We continued walking through the streets, up and down canals, arriving at the flower market that sits on one canal. It used to actually have barges that docked there, but eventually they became permanent fixtures.
From there we made our way to the museums, the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. We enjoyed the Rijksmuseum together, including Rembrandt's "The Night Watch" and Vermeer's "The Milkmaid".
The line to get into the Van Gogh Museum was long enough that I decided to take Ashley and Ryan and make the journey back to the car while Katie and Heather toured the museum. It was perfect, too, as they truly enjoyed spending time in there and Ashley would not have. While we found our way by public transportation back to the car, Katie and Heather were doing a scavenger hunt in the museum that happened to be going on. And surprisingly, Katie actually was relatively familiar with Van Gogh, as her art class had been studying him recently (around his birthday). So Katie was familiar with "Sunflowers" and "Starry Night", even pointing them out as we would run into replications of them throughout the city. And just as I picked them up from the museum, it started to rain a bit. But at that point, we didn't care, as we were on our way to our hotel near Keukenhof for the night.
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