Hello Sunshine!

We woke up to our first sunny day in Europe. No clouds at all! It was still a bit cool as we started our day, but it warmed up.

We enjoyed our free breakfast of boiled eggs, toast, coffee, and fruit at the hotel and then we went out into the city.




We jumped on the tram (we decided to buy 24 hour tickets since we had a lot we wanted to see), and went to the Van Gogh museum. It walked you through his life and his art based on location and technique stages that he was in. That was a cool way to lay it out. They had one of the 5 of the series of Sunflowers, and many of his self-portraits. I was kind of bummed that many of his more famous works weren't there, like starry night, Sunflowers.


This was my favorite painting that they had there. Actually, only one of them. I like all of his orchard and blossom paintings too. So these are my two favorite paintings of the paintings that we got to see :)




Next to the Van Gogh museum was another museum that housed lots of Rembrandt's art. A lot of it is closed for renovations, so we didn't go in.

But in front of it they had this popular icon:


Doug got a picture with his letter


And our letters were next to each other :)


We started walking to the tram to get to our next destination, and ran into a river canal tour. So we took it. It was a beautiful tour through the canal, out to the harbor, and back into the city. The tour lasted an hour and we took lots of pictures. These were the best of them:




















We took a tram to the other side of the city to go to a flea market and a park that we had heard about and read about in my kindle book. The market was fun to walk around and the park was gorgeous! It was right on the canal and there were people enjoying the beautiful day there








More canals. Can't get enough :)


A church that is right next to the central station


The Anne Frank House


We ended our day at the Anne Frank house. We had come earlier in the day but the line was sooo long and people told us that it would be shorter if we came back in the evening. They were right. This was the house that the Frank family hid in, in the Secret Annex behind the house. There was lots of information and artifacts. There was a video interview with Miep, one of Mr. Frank's work associates that helped hide them. There was an interview with her dad explaining why he published her diary and how he felt like he didn't know the Anne that was in the diary. We were able to walk through the rooms that they hid in. That was pretty powerful, to know that 8 people hid in there for over 2 years. There was a map where Mr. Frank had been charting the progress of Normandy. There were the pencil markings on the wall recording the growth of Anne and her sister, Margot. All of Anne's pictures that she glued to the walls were still there. Only furniture was gone, which the Nazi's took after they discovered the people. Mr. Frank wanted the museum to be kept that way. I've always been fascinated with the story of Anne Frank, so it was unreal to be able to be where she had been. They even had some of her diaries on display.

We got some McDonalds for dinner and ate in front of the Dam Monument. Then we walked through some more stores and found some pastries :)

We came back to our hotel to plan our travel for tomorrow and to update internet world. Now we're off to sleep. On to Hamburg in the morning!