Day 6 and 7: Amsterdam!!

Wow, Amsterdam is pretty crazy!!  Yesterday we had a busy day of traveling from Antwerp to Amsterdam, and when we got out of the train station here's what we saw:

Apparently they're having a big problem right now with dangerous cocaine, and multiple tourists have died. So, that was kinda interesting to see right when we arrived in Amsterdam. 

After we were all settled at our B&B (and the owner warned us again about the dangerous cocaine...), we walked over to the Van Gogh Museum! It was beyond awesome, and definitely one of the best museums I've ever been to. It was 4 floors, and the progression of the floors kinda took you through the progression of his career/life. Did you know that Van Gogh did all of his paintings within a 10 year time period?  I had no idea - I thought it was over a much larger time period. I learned a lot about his family that I didn't know... Like he had a brother that he was very close with (Theo), and they lived together for quite awhile... And Theo really believed in Vincent's talent, so he supported him financially pretty much until he died. And Theo died approximately 6 months after Vincent's death... which at first I was like, "Awww he died of a broken heart!" because they were so close, but then later in the museum it said that he died of syphilis. Soooo... that's not as sweet. And Theo's widow and her son were the ones that made sure Vincent's art was put in museums and they're the reason he's now so famous... And the nephew was the one who made sure the Van Gogh Museum was created so that they could house most of Vincent's works in one spot. It was a really great experience, and I highly recommend the museum if you're ever around Amsterdam!

Then last night we had our great Thanksgiving dinner, as I told you in yesterday's post. Duck and steak and beer... Pretty much just like the pilgrims.

Today we were supposed to go to Anne Frank's House this morning (we had tickets for 9:40am), but it turns out they were having a little problem with a power outage in that part of the neighborhood... So they told us to come back around 11am. So, we did... And the power was still out. So then we decided we'd just try to come back before it closed, but go see everything else we wanted to see first. So... we headed over to the Red Light District. Yep, we did it.  It was pretty nutso, and it's pretty much what you think it'll be. They warn you not to take pictures in the Red Light District, because it makes you a target for theft, and also people in that area really value their privacy and will come rip your camera right out of your hands. So, I snapped ONE picture right when we were first arriving in the Red Light District, and then I put my camera away for the rest of our time there. We walked through all of the major streets, and saw lots of naked (or mostly naked) ladies in the windows offering up their... um... "services", and the smell of pot was pretty much everywhere. We also saw a girl that was laying on the sidewalk with all of her friends around her and they looked worried and she was NOT looking good and puking quite a bit, and then we saw that they were in front of a magic mushroom shop. So... that explains that.  We did a pretty thorough walking tour of the Red Light District, and probably the most shocking thing to me was that there were CHILDREN in the Red Light District!!!  Why-oh-why would anyone bring children there???  I have no idea. But, it was definitely an experience.

Here's the one photo I took. It's a condom shop and museum. That was right when you first enter the Red Light District, so I figured that was safe for a picture... 

From there, we made our way over to the Rijksmuseum, and had a really nice lunch of some Dutch cheeses and meats in the museum's cafe. Then we spent hours exploring the museum. It was HUGE, and there's no way we could see everything there. We saw quite a lot though. And after we were done there, we headed over to Anne Frank's House again and finally got in!!  They've done a really good job with turning the house into a museum, and it's all very tastefully and respectfully done. It's quite a moving experience. I'd never read Anne Frank's Diary in school or anything, so I made sure I read it before our trip, and I actually finished it the day we left for Belgium. I'm so glad I read it - It made the experience so much more special. 

This is a view of Anne Frank's House. It's about half-way down that block of houses.  I love all of the canals here... 

I just thought this was a cool building... 

Another cool building!

Here's Kevin! He'll hate this picture... 

Here's the monument in Dam Square (on our way to the Red Light District)

These are some buildings over near the central train station

Here's Amsterdam Central Station! Gorgeous...

The Rijksmuseum!!  

Here's the entrance to the Rijksmuseum. It's a crazy huge building.

Our lunch! There were like 6 Dutch cheeses and 4 meats. 

I took a few pictures of some of the impressive windows in the museum. Here's one!

Here's another cool window...

And another cool window! 

It's early evening on our last night here in Europe, so I think we're gonna head out and see what kind of trouble we can get into. We've had an amazing trip!!  I can't believe we leave tomorrow! I'll post again sometime soon from Philly!!  I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving, and have a good weekend!  

Day 5: Antwerp!

Yesterday we took a morning train to Antwerp! And one of the things that I'd heard was a must-see in Antwerp was the train station, so that was convenient. It was absolutely gorgeous, so I took about a million pictures of it. I've never seen such a pretty train station! 

This is what we saw right when we got off of our train, so I was already impressed.

Then it got even more impressive once we went through the doorway by the tracks.

And then there was a wooly mammoth... I don't know why. 

But back to the beautifulness! 

So pretty... 

And here's the outside of it!!  Can you believe this is a TRAIN STATION??  

Then we went and checked in at our B&B, which was only about a 10 minute walk from the train station. The owners of the B&B were so sweet, and we loved our room! It had a nice bedroom with a HUGE bathroom, and then off of the bedroom we had our own sitting room with a dining room table, couch, and TV! Crazy. And they said that in the morning they would bring us breakfast at any time we'd like and set it up on our dining room table. So, I'll skip ahead with the pictures really fast and show you what breakfast looked like! Breakfasts in Belgium consist of bread, cheese, ham of some sort, yogurt, an egg, orange juice, and coffee. It's the same everywhere (just different cheeses and breads), and it appears it's the same in the Netherlands too! 

Here was our breakfast in the morning! Quite a spread. There's scrambled eggs, yogurts, breads, cheeses and ham, coffee, OJ, a big ol' slab of butter, and two jams. Oh and kiwi and pineapple. 

After we got all settled in at our B&B, we started exploring Antwerp! The downtown area was beautiful, and we made our way over to the historic area. We only had a few things that we REALLY wanted to see, and other than that we just wanted to explore and see what looked cool. I badly wanted to see the Botanical Gardens, because they have some cool statues, etc there... And then we also thought it'd be fun to stop by De Vagant, which is a bar that specializes in Belgian gins (it's called jenever). The Belgians are known for their beer, but they're also super proud of their gins. McGee likes some gin, so he gave one of Antwerp's local gins a try. Unfortunately, he did not like it... 

Some cool buildings. 

More pretty buildings... 

Kevin sipping on some gin (but no juice... like the song... Get it?). I took one little sip too and I thought it was absolutely disgusting (but I think that of all gin... ).

Cool statues in the botanical gardens!! It was tough to get a good picture, because you couldn't get too close or you'd be standing on head... 

A cute little building in the botanical gardens. 

A pretty building out on the street! Everywhere you turned, there was another beautiful building. 

See?? ANOTHER beautiful building. 

Then we took the long ol' walk over to the MAS museum. We didn't really have time (or the stamina) to do a proper visit, but we'd heard that you could take escalators to the top of the museum for free, and the views were amazing. So, we wanted to do that for sure! Unfortunately, it was kind of foggy and misty by this point, so we were guessing the views wouldn't be as spectacular as they could be.. But we figured we should check it out, especially since it had escalators so we didn't have to hike up stairs! 

The MAS museum was really the only modern looking building in the area! It was super cool though. 

This was the best view from the top I thought. SUCH beautiful buildings! 

And now we're in Amsterdam!! I'll do a proper post on Amsterdam tomorrow, but I just thought I'd take a moment to show you how we spent our Thanksgiving meal. We had a very nice dinner (duck for McGee, and steak for me... both were quite delicious), and drank some nice beers. We had a very relaxing evening, after a super busy day!!  I'll post tomorrow about the fun of Amsterdam. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!!  

Cheers! Happy Thanksgiving!! 

Day 4: Exploring Brussels

Today we had a nice relaxing day of exploring Brussels more thoroughly. It's such a great city, and today we got to see a lot more of it!!

We started our morning by taking a pretty long walk over to the Cantillon Brewery. It was founded in 1900, and it's a traditional family-run brewery that's known for its lambics. They do everything the old-fashioned way at this brewery, and one of the most interesting parts is the fermentation process: they leave it completely up to nature and don't add any yeasts. They rely on wild airborne yeasts to start the fermentation process during open-air cooling in a large copper vessel. The brewery wants the wild airborne yeast to get in their lambic but they don't want bugs, bacteria, etc that are prevalent during the warmer seasons to contaminate their lambic, so they only brew during the cold season: the end of October through early April. It's really fascinating... And the brewery itself is really fascinating too, because they still use equipment from the 19th century. The tour was self-guided, which was a lot of fun. It was cool to explore this super old brewery on our own, and we had booklets that they gave us to help us with the tour. Oh another thing I thought was funny was that during the tour I was noticing TONS of huge spider webs everywhere, and we were commenting to each other about how that'd never fly in the U.S., and then in the tour booklet they actually comment on the spider webs towards the end of it. They said that insecticides are harmful to beer maturing in barrels, so they let Mother Nature take care of the job of controlling insects... and that means spiders! Spiders are natural predators, so they help maintain the biological equilibrium in the brewery by controlling insects. They never destroy cobwebs or kills spiders in the brewery. At the end of the tour, we got to sample some of the lambics!! These are not the super sweet fizzy lambics that they offer sometimes in the states. There was nothing sweet about these lambics! They were potent.

Here's McGee standing in front of some of the old-school equipment! 

Another area in the brewery... 

 Here's the copper cooling area for the open air fermentation (you can see the windows that they open on the left side of the picture)

Our samples after the tour! 

We had another awesome Belgian waffle today. I can't get enough of them! They're so good with the caramelized sugar on the outside. And the Belgians don't eat waffles like we do - they aren't breakfast or a dessert really, they're more of a snack that you walk around with. They don't put syrup, etc on them like we do! They usually just eat them plain, or sometimes with jam on them. Interesting, huh? After our waffle, we walked over to the Delirium bar. They sell Delirium's beer in the states (it has a pink elephant on it), but the bar has their own beer and a HUGE selection of other Belgian beers. So we spent some time hanging out there. Oh and we made sure to get McGee some mussels today! He loves mussels, and it is definitely mussels season here in Belgium. 

For dinner, we went to this awesome tiny restaurant that specializes in Belgian comfort food, and it was AMAZING. The name of their restaurant translates to The Greedy Glutton. They cook pretty much everything with beer (of course). McGee had rabbit and frites, and I had some chicken in a kriek sauce along with stoemp (a potato and vegetable dish). After supper, we went to this super teeny tiny old bar that McGee read about online, because it's one of the few bars that offers a trappist beer he really wanted to try. The beer is called Westvleteren 12, and it's ranked as one of the best beers in the world. McGee agreed. 

Here's the inside of the bar! There were some beautiful windows. 

Here McGee is leaving the bar! 

And this is the funny little doorway that leads to the alley that the bar is down. Can you see how short the doorway is? If you compare it to the garage doors next to it, you can see how tiny it is... 

Here's another picture of some Christmas lights that are up in Brussels! It's so pretty.

Tomorrow we leave for Antwerp! We've had a lovely 4 nights staying in Brussels, and next it's one night in Antwerp and then 2 in Amsterdam after that! This has been an amazing trip so far!! 

Day 3: A funny thing happened on the way to Paris...

So, Paris totally almost didn't happen. Yesterday (Monday) was our day we'd planned for Paris, and it turns out that Monday was also the day that the Belgian Transit decided to go on a strike! Yeah... And it didn't happen until we were already sitting on our train. Like right after we sat down we felt and heard the train shut down, and then there was an announcement that the train had shut off, and that there was a protest on the tracks.  So... we decided to just roll with it for awhile, and we came up with the plan that if it hadn't started running by 10:30am (about 2 hours after the scheduled departure) then we'd just get off the train and go find something else to do that day. We figured maybe we'd just save Paris for a different trip at another time. While we were waiting we watched Star Trek: Into Darkness on McGee's Ipod, so it wasn't so bad. We were completely relaxed really. But, then at about 10am the doors shut, and then the train started up! Off to Paris we went!

The transit employees came through the train handing out flyers with this on it. We didn't understand anything it said, but we got the general idea: We weren't going anywhere anytime soon.

We arrived in Paris at about 11:30am, and took another train to Notre Dame Cathedral, and oh my goodness it's jaw-dropping gorgeous. The windows are absolutely stunning (pictures can't do them justice), and the architecture is really beautiful too. After we finished there, we took the looooong walk from Notre Dame to the Eiffel Tower, walking along the River Seine the whole time. It was beautiful. While walking, we passed by the Louvre, so we stopped by there to just kinda check out the building. We knew we wouldn't have time to go in (that's at LEAST a full day on its own!), so we just checked out the courtyard and the massive building. It's really stunning. We also stopped for lunch (with wine, of course!) on our walk, and we saw the very famous bridge with all of the locks (I have no idea what it's actually called... but I'm sure you've seen it! People buy locks to attach to the walls of the bridge, and it's supposed to "lock them in love forever"... hmm...).  After what felt like a millions steps, we finally reached the Eiffel Tower! And then we figured, "Hey, let's walk some more!" so we payed the 5 Euros to hike up the million steps to the 2nd floor. It was a tough climb, but it felt really good when we made it. And the views were amazing.

Notre Dame Cathedral

One of the windows! 

Another window! 

Notre Dame again! 

The locks on the bridge!

You can see the wall of locks! 

Part of the Louvre! Such a beautiful building!!  

The courtyard of the Louvre! It was great to just hang out here for a bit.

It's so pretty!! 

The view from the 2nd floor of the Eiffel Tower! It was very worth the hike.

 After we hiked back down those million steps (and my legs were soooo shaky by this point) we decided to go sit at a cafe and relax. McGee had some wine, and I had a coffee (it was chilly outside!). Then we walked back over to the Eiffel Tower, because we wanted to see it all lit up at night! It was soooo darn pretty. After we had our fill of watching people take selfies in front of the Eiffel Tower (people and their selfies are kind of obnoxious here... soooo many people even have those "selfie stick" things!), we took the train over to the Arc de Triomphe (because I was not up for that mile-plus walk at this point), and had a great time viewing the Arc at night. It's beautiful. We sat on a bench and just relaxed and enjoyed the amazing evening. It was lovely.

The Eiffel Tower at night!!  Gorgeous.

The Arc de Triomphe!

Here's the view from the bench we were sitting on for awhile! We had the whole area to ourselves. 

Then we went to another cafe for dinner, and then it was time to start our train rides back at about 8pm!!  It was such an amazing day, and I totally get what all of the fuss over Paris is about. It lives up to all its hype, and it's a really beautiful city. Oh, and just so you know I'm not exaggerating TOO much: We walked about 13 miles yesterday! It felt like more, but that may have been because of all those stairs to the 2nd floor of the Eiffel Tower. Our legs are hurting today!! We're having a blast!!