Checking out the land of clogs and cheese

Ta da!! I'm in Tilburg, Netherlands!

I spent the weekend in Holland visiting a friend of mine from Waterloo. Carrie is currently doing a semester abroad at the University of Tilburg. Since she was on the same continent as me, I thought it would be a super-de-duper idea to visit her. Turns out that whole "same continent" thing still meant a 6 hour train ride... It's a good thing I can read on the train!



Carrie and I spent the first evening wandering around downtown Tilburg checking out the local sights. First we ate dinner - at a pub which had a random rotating bar. It took a "are you seeing what I think I'm seeing?" question to be sure that it really was moving. There were also a couple really pretty churches (that played creepy bell music - think Tim Burton), a castle that no one actually lived in (he died first), and a statue of a Scotsman playing the bagpipes! That one made me chuckle.



Before we went back to Carrie's place, we stopped in at a local cafe for some spiffy hot chocolate - like you can see, it was a glass of hot milk with a block of chocolate on a stick. You stirred the milk with the chocolate, thus turning your milk chocolate-y! Mmm



We were up bright and early the next day to catch the train to Amsterdam. This time the train ride was only an hour! Phew. We wandered slowly from the train station, through the tourist district, to our hotel. Below you can see us hanging out in the central square. We saw Batman there - he fit right in with the old architecture. I mean, if you didn't look really hard, you couldn't even tell he was there...

Unfortunately, the weather wasn't so great that Saturday morning... The rain was on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again, on-ag... well, you get the picture. But we killed some time during the on-again parts by walking through some stores. Most of them were very touristy, but then we found the flower shops.

Yep, that's me standing infront of about a bazillion different types of tulips.

But tulips weren't the only flower we saw there. They actually had Venus Flytraps... crazy!

And the best part about these stores was that although the store fronts were on a street, the majority of the store was actually floating on barges tied up to the side of the road. Check it out:

Amsterdam also had these really random elephant statues ALL over the city. And they all looked different. I think one of my favourites was the elephant covered with tomatoes... How random is that?! But we also like the Elephant of Many Faces. Can you find mine?? It's gonna be tricky...

Well, I'm either one of the faces, or the elephant is trying to eat me alive...

Once we checked into our unbelievably fabulous hotel (Carries boyfriend was super awesome and booked us a hotel - instead of having to stay in a hostel. Not only did we each get a double bed with more pillows than we knew what to do with, but there was a bathtub!! Bliss, absolute bliss :)

But getting back to the story. Once we checked into the hotel, we walked over to the Heineken Brewery for the grand tour. It was pretty sweet - you learned about the founders, the brewing process, saw the huge old copper vats, did a taste test and saw a whole lot of Heineken merchandise.

We're making beer!

One of the super cool exhibits they had was a "bottles throughout the ages" - they showed how the bottle design had changed since the beginning and had examples there. The coolest by far, was the WOBO (World Bottle). After it was empty, it could be used to build houses. I have no idea how many were actually built, but it was a pretty crazy recycling idea.

Oooh... green! It's like being under the sea!

Yep, Amsterdam, city of many many many many canals. Sure are pretty.

And here we see the oh-so-famous Holland clog. Built for a giant. I would hate to hear someone dance in that shoe!

The next stop on our self-guided city tour, was the Anne Frank House. Not the most uplifting place I've ever visited, but totally worth visiting. It was both incredible and awful. You get to walk through the entire house - starting in the workshop and offices on the first two floors. You also get to see scale models of what the secret annex looked like while they were hiding there. There are also random artifacts - like Margot's latin workbook, and the pictures that Anne glued to the walls.

I can't even describe to you, though, what it was like to walk out of the offices and see the bookcase that hid the door to the annex. And then to climb the stairs and walk through the rooms where they hid. It was really intense. One of the biggest things for me was realizing that they had to have blacklight curtains on the windows at all times. They lived without natural sunlight for 2 years. It broke my heart.

But I think it's incredible how her legacy - her courage and hope and passion for freedom - have lived on.

Here's a beautiful view of an Amsterdam canal at night:

We certainly appreciated this view. But about 10 minutes later, when we discovered we were lost, we were not longer concerned with how pretty the city was. We had to stop at a gas station to figure out where on the map we were. As luck would have it, we managed to get lost taking a short cut!

Over the course of the weekend, not only did we see shoes everywhere we looked (and I mean everywhere!), but you could find a cheese store every 10 steps. Oh I do love cheese...

Say "Cheese"!

We had some time to kill before the train home, so we wandered around what we thought was the shopping district. What we found instead, was a park and the "I Amsterdam" sign.

Carrie is Amsterdam!

And my initials were hiding within too...

I am ST!

Home again Sunday night. Neither one of us felt like cooking, so we ordered up a wonderfully north american pizza and wandered around the Tilburg University campus. It was quite nice - lots of green.

Carrie on the Tilburg campus

Then it was a peaceful nights sleep before a 6 hour train ride home. What a wonderful trip it was :) But boy was it nice to get back to Germany. Not only was the cost of living in the Netherlands quite expensive, but listening to Dutch was driving me CRAZY! I felt like I was listening to German underwater or something. The languages are just similar enough that I can pick out a few words here and there, but not enough to really understand anything. Bah! Although it did make watching "So you think you can dance - Netherland Edition" really interesting. I kept trying to interpret what the judges were saying.

But now I'm back in Germany, and I've only got a week left until my orientation course for my new job! eep!

Sandy