In these last couple of weeks we’ve traveled a lot through our beautiful country and discovered a few amazing places, but I still have so many things to tell you about my last vacation and.. I must go on with the part that I loved the most: our trip to the Netherlands 😀 I can’t start with anything else than Amsterdam, right? 🙂
Three years ago I’ve been to Amsterdam for the first time, but honestly I don’t remember too many things from my trip here. There were some cold November days, with rain, wind and just a little bit of daylight, since the sun sets very early in that period of the year there. It was also a lot more crowded than I would have expected, probably because we were here during the weekend, but still.. it was November! 😀
Since our first visit to Amsterdam wasn’t a big hit, we’ve always wanted to come back here, especially during the summer to discover and enjoy more of it. But if we complained about rain and cold weather in our first visit here, this time it was just the opposite, with scorching hot temperatures that were nearly impossible to bare. Every single day we’ve had more than 30 degrees, which is pretty unusual for the Netherlands, and it was extremely hard to take the right photos with all that sunlight. But in the end, I think we’ve done a great job!
We’ve decided to stay in the outskirts of Amsterdam, away from all the craziness of the city, in a lovely village with a few canals and flowers everywhere, with our hotel nestled right next to a golf course. The entire place looked like it came straight out of a fairy tale, with lush green everywhere, in a quiet setting that’s just what you need after a full day in Amsterdam.
We went in town very early in the morning and started our journey between Amsterdam’s wonderful canals in the beautiful 9 streets neighborhood, a trendy and laid-back area of the city with numerous boutiques, cozy cafes and sooo many gorgeous buildings 😀 From there we went on to see Anne Frank’s house, a place that I’ve wanted to see with my own eyes ever since I’ve heard her story.
If you don’t know who was Anne Frank, I could tell you in just a few words that she was a 13-year old girl who was hiding in this house from the Nazis for more than 2 years during the Second World War. She kept a diary where she wrote every single day exactly what was happening around her, a story that would become famous ever since.
Unfortunately Anne Frank was caught in the end and she was taken to Auschwitz together with her family, where she passed away from a disease, but her dad survived and after the war he published her diary. Anne Frank’s was translated in more than 65 languages and Anne became a symbol of Nazi victims.
After this sad part of our journey, we went straight to the town’s center that felt like a completely different world. There were thousands of tourists in Dam Square, so much noise, dirt, everybody was taken pics, trams, bikes – it felt like a real chaos from where I wanted to escape immediately. Then we’ve went to the Red Light District and it was all the same.
Probably if it wasn’t so crowded I would have appreciated the city more, but after a few hours I felt very tired from all that noise and all those swarms of tourists. We’ve headed to the Central train station to take a few photos with Amsterdam’s famed dancing houses and then we’ve just relaxed at a terrace near the canals, enjoying lunch with a superb view. That was enough for our first day in town 🙂
I hope you like these pics 😀
