Category Archives: Netherlands

Today we off to Volendam and Zaanse Schans another day of adventuring :)

Volendam is a sea side town north east of Amsterdam. Its primary draw is to those who can afford vacation homes and have boats in the harbour. It is defiantly a tourist favorite since there were SO many tourist groups and souvenir shops along the pier. To me it was a combination of the Comox Harbour because of all of the boats within the harbour. As well as White Rock for all the shops, restaurants and liveliness along the pier. We soaked up the sunshine and

Zaanse Schans aka Windmill time!! Its only expectable in the Netherlands. It was beautiful, so picturesque! On one half of the windmills were behind a large canal and on the other side were fields that stretched for a vast distance (especially since everything is so flat in the Netherlands). In between the two were even more canals and islands where there were sheep grazing. Each windmill was cultivating energy for certain task. For example one was using energy to make peanut oil and the other to dry clothes. There was also a cheese factory, with samples! I tried SO many different types if cheese sheep, goat, cow, smoked, with herbs and my favorite lavender cheese! First of all it was purple which is just awesome and secondly it tastes exactly to what I would imagine lavender to :) There was also a clog museum where It showed the advancement and history of clogs throughout the years. It was super interesting! To top it all off there was a demonstration of clogs being made. It literally take 10 minutes to carve and make clogs out if a single piece of wood; however they had to dry them for 3 weeks before they can be painted! See there was really EVERYTHING at Zaanse Schans!

Again after a few busy days we decided to take it easy today. Also this in our last full day in Amsterdam! Its crazy how quickly time has gone by already.

We mostly spent today walking around the Dam Area, which is mostly the shopping district. Sadly we can only window shop since we just have our backpacks are already full enough!

We also joined a walking tour, just to see what else we could learn about the city from a local. I was able to see the city from a more historic point of view. It was a tad on the longer side; 3 hours in total, but entertaining and informative overall!

Weeoo another adventure day! Today we are going around Holland and to visit 3 cities: Dordrecht, Delft and Hague.

Dordrecht:
Down to the south of the Netherlands! This smaller city had lovely canals (what else do you expect) and and overall peaceful atmosphere. We saw the Groothoofd, a quay where three rivers met. The Grote Kerk- a medieval church built in the 11th century. The city hall building was constructed in the 14th century however it was used as the major trading centre until the 16th century when the city began to use it as their city hall.

Delft: The homeland of the iconic blue and white ceramics! The city was swarmed with so many tourists! Other than ceramics it is also known to be a student town, as there us a large technical university nearby! We couldn’t miss seeing the Oude Kerk which is in fact leaning (not by fault of my lack of photography skills) and saw City Hall. There was also a huge market lined along both sides of a canal, stretching for a few blocks.
Hague: This was my favorite town out of all three! First after many political science and history courses the is where all of the power of the country is! Even though the official capital is Amsterdam all government is run within Hague. I absolutely adored how this city flawlessly blended contemporary and historic buildings!  One street there is a newly built arts theatre and just a few blocks is the 13th century  Riodderzaal.

It was museum day today! Aka Andreas ultimate favorite kind of day ;)
We heard that the Anne Frank museum is always insanely busy, so in attempt to be somewhat prepared we went online to buy to tickets. To our surprise we saw that they were bought out till July. Even arriving half an hour before it opened we had to wait for an hour, and the line wrapped all around the church.

In my opinion the museum was well done. Although the rooms were empty depictions, models and photos allowed me to imagine what it would have been like. I enjoyed the message the museum had at the end the exhibition, to remember that there are thousands of Anne Franks stories that go untold.

We then had a quick bite to eat and headed off to the Rijksmuseum. It had collections all the way from the 1100’s! We thought that 3 hours would suffice to see everything but since university taught us well we spent the majority of the time reading plaques. We were given a 30 minute warning and realized that we had 2 more floors to cover! The last floor of the special collections turned out to be our favorite, so Im glad we got to see it even for a little bit!

The sun was shinning when we left so we grabbed some waffles and sat in a beautiful courtyard with tulips and fountains to soak up a the sunshine.