One Week in Amsterdam

Hello from Grantchester Village, Cambridge! We made it. We've only been back from Amsterdam for about two days and already have many stories to tell about life in a foreign country. But, before I start in on those stories, I have to convince you that Amsterdam is a must visit city. We loved our time there.

When we arrived, we followed the directions to the B&B we had booked and arrived here (the door to the left of Jason led into the house):

He had to be careful not to hurt himself going in and out! The door led through a hallway and out the back of the house to a beautiful garden with a foot path that wound to a nice little guest house.

Every morning we had fresh croissants and rolls delivered to our door and the owner, Beatrijs, was very friendly. I highly recommend Logement Hanna Penso if you're ever looking for a place to stay in Amsterdam!

We did lots of sightseeing and LOTS of walking. Amsterdam is a beautiful city to walk; with hundreds of canals and over 4000 bridges, there is no shortage of places to go. We ate most of our meals at little canal side cafes like this one:
And over half of the pictures I took were of canals and bridges. I won't bore you with multiples, but this is one of my favorite because it captures one of Amsterdam's other characteristic sites - bicycles EVERYWHERE!!

In our walking around, we also visited Dam Square, the so called Times Square, of Amsterdam. It was a very busy plaza on which the Royal Palace was located:

Not far from the square was the main shopping mall in Amsterdam - pretty amazing isn't it!?

Next we saw the "skinny house" (reddish house in the middle):

The house isn't actually this narrow all the way back, it opens up more toward the rear of the house. It was built during a time when - to reflect the value of prime, canal front property - households were taxed based on the square footage of the side of the home facing the canal. Many people in the city tried tricks such as this to get around paying high tax rates!

Another interesting thing we saw was that most of the homes had a hook like this one protruding from their roof tops:
Rather than carrying furniture up the steep stairs of the buildings, they simply hook a pulley and a rope to these hooks and hoist everything through upper windows.

We also saw (but didn't try out) these very public urinals:

One of the highlights of Jason's week was perusing the many boekmarkts (Dutch for book market) that we stumbled upon - doesn't he look like he's in heaven?:


Last, but certainly not least, we visited the Ann Frank house:

After reading the Diary of Ann Frank, it was an incredibly interesting tour.

Finally, this one's for you mom - a neat flower we saw growing on a vine in someone's garden:

Several days after taking this picture, I found a bulb for the same plant in a flower market and picked one up for you - now I just need to figure out how to get it there!