(Can you find me in the “i amsterdam” letters?)

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This is it, folks. The final stretch. The final hours. I’ll be home on Sunday, and I will most likely be in shock. Do not be alarmed if when I see you again I do not remember your face. It will come with time.

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What may never come is the full realization of all I have DONE this past semester. For one, I’ve completed my first college semester! That’s exciting, since UW is technically on the quarter system. Wow.

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But enough of that. I don’t have the energy to dwell on my quickly dwindling time abroad. I’ll just tell you about the Netherlands instead, to further procrastinate on the three papers I have due within the next few days. (UPDATE: I started writing this a few days ago, and I am now completely done with all papers and all schoolwork for the semester! My books are returned and my compendiums are all lovingly stowed in the recycling pile.)

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I landed on Friday night after sleeping through most of my public transportation for the day: the bus, the train, the metro, the plane. I was exhausted. But that didn’t stop us from walking the smelly streets of Amsterdam in the dark. All we really did that first night was look at tourist shops (because despite what people say about “tourist traps” and “tacky souvenirs,” I think these types of things are an interesting part of a trip, especially since, you know…. we are tourists), and eat fresh Belgian fries out of a paper cone, because the Dutch and the Belgians tend to be a bit fuzzy on which country they actually live in.

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Beautiful view from my window seat, after Brian finally showed me how to choose seats during check-in!

I know it’s hard to see, but all those little lines are canals as we came in for landing in the Netherlands. I’m not kidding. There is more water than road. I was staring and craning my neck for the longest time trying to figure out if what I was seeing was asphalt or water in between all these crop fields, and of course it turned out to be water, because the Dutch are crazy and refuse to accept that they are soon to become the next Atlantis.

Cool lighting artwork in the airport

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It wasn’t until I landed that I realized I had no idea what was actually IN Amsterdam. I was just going because that had been one of Jackson’s and my To-Do cities. Thank goodness Mom got carried away on Google and practically gave me a step-by-step guide to Amsterdam over Viber.

I knew there would be bikes

Even hip, rusty bikes that may or may not be some form of art piece

I did not know there would be vending machine restaurants

Or cheese shops on every corner (WOW. I just tried to spell that “quarner.” What is wrong with me?!)

Christmas decorations! (The next day, we actually saw a bunch of Dutch teens in “black face” dressed as Santa’s elves because of their history of slaves playing the part of the elves……….. A little awk…)

More bikes

And yet more bikes. I’m not sure that I actually saw more bike RIDERS in Amsterdam compared to Copenhagen, but I definitely saw a lot more parked bikes. Not sure what that’s about, or how often some of those bikes get used!

One of the cutest little Dutch benches ever (aside from THE The Fault In Our Stars bench- more on that later)

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On a side note, I’m currently writing this from the ‘silent car’ of the train, where you are not allowed to talk and there’s a little sign of a man shushing everybody on every window. However, I don’t think it’s ever been quite as silent as it is tonight, despite it being half full. It feels like I am in the Suzallo reading room of train cars. I am supposed to be working on an essay, but I’m afraid my little portable keyboard clicks will be too loud. I can even hear that the lady across from me needs to blow her nose: the snot vibrates a little every time she inhales, and it echoes throughout the car. Should I give her a tissue?

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Kay, back to Amsterdam. I wanted to stay and go swing dancing, but the dance didn’t start until 9:30 (So late! Haha I’m not used to doing things late at night any more. I wonder if that will change once I get back to Seattle, because if it doesn’t, I won’t be doing much dancing!) and we finished our exploring by 7:30. We ended up just training it back to Leiden, where the beautiful and wonderful siblings Koen and Iris lent us free living quarters!!!! THANK SO MUCH KOEN, EVEN THOUGH WE SORT OF STOOD YOU UP FOR COFFEE IN NORWAY, AND THANK SO MUCH IRIS, EVEN THOUGH I STILL HAVEN’T MET YOU.

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The place was adorable, there was a bathtub (I used it. Couldn’t wait another week.), and the stairs were only semi-dangerously steep. (Jackson fell down them on Sunday morning, but nothing was broken or bleeding, so I consider that ‘safe enough.’)

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Saturday, I slept until eleven, as is customary. Then, off to Leiden’s town centre went we! The shopping street was dizzyingly long and lit with strings of lights. We found lots of licorice, because they like that sort of thing in Northern Europe. And we found this strange man who drove this electronic, musical puppet cart around, and every few feet he stopped to let it play a song, all the while shaking a tiny tambourine, before continuing on. It reminded me of the scene where Shrek and Donkey arrive in Farquad’s town.

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Wow. Just got off the silent train, and I’m taken aback yet again by how many stars there are here. I don’t know what it is. The not-so-tall trees? The not-so-tall houses? The lack of mountains? It’s not like the street and house lights are lacking, but I guess they might be a bit dimmer, and the street lamps are definitely a bit shorter. Whatever the cause, the night sky in Birkerød is huge and impressive. I usually have no trouble picking out a few constellations on my walk home. I’ll definitely miss this.

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Right. Leiden. Man, Jackson and I are the Cafe Couple, let me tell you. He suggested I compile a collage of all the hot chocolate pictures I’ve taken this semester, and if I follow through, I think it will be quite sizeable.

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We hopped into the the first cafe we saw, it being nearly noon, the apartment being out of milk, and both of us starving. No regrets.

That thing in front of Jackson is “sort of a sandwich,” to quote our waitress. More like a curry stir fry dumped onto a giant piece of bread, with a second slice thrown on top as an afterthought. Pro: it was delicious, as was the soup I’ve been craving for four months.

Windmills!

More windmills! Some of them were even moving, unlike the decorative bunch you normally find in old parts of town. As you can see, the clouds were threatening us all day, but we managed to stay pleasantly cool and dry.

A memorial to Rembrandt (three different mediums to depict the same old chum!)

And speaking of chums, here’s me getting chummy with him… Tehe

Canals

Chocolate hedgehogs… Too cute to eat!

I got really excited when I saw these because I thought it said “Sally Square,” which is very similar to one of my nicknames, “Sally Squared.” Jackson kindly pointed out that the first word is actually “Salty,” which makes a lot more sense with relation to chocolate.

This, my dear reader(s?), is the licorice section of the biggest candy shop in Leiden. My silly mother asked me to bring her back some licorice, but it was just so hard to choose!!! (YUCK.)

What she should have asked for was a stroopwaffle or two, a delicious Dutch cookie-waffle-caramel hybrid that crunches and smunches and oozes and ugh. So good. I’ve had the packaged kind in Copenhagen, but we tried our hand at some fresh ones in the town center at a stroopwaffle truck. No regrets.

More pretty canals

More canals!!!!?!?!!?! It was getting dark by the time we made it back indoors.

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For dinner, we wandered into a little burger cafe. It seemed classy though, and as we walked in and saw two tiny, blonde, pony-tailed women sharing a salad in the middle of the room, the only inhabitants of the place, I could tell something was off. One of them stood and greeted us: she was the cashier, cook, and apparently the owner. The store had only opened three weeks ago! This should be fun, I thought.

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It was called Mix & Fix, and from the menus plastered to the windows outside, we had gathered that we got to choose the toppings, dressings, and burger, which would be assembled before us. (The menu was in Dutch, of course, so we failed to recognize what exactly the ingredients were.) We clarified this with the woman, and Jackson rounded it off with, ‘So first, I guess we just choose the meat?’ I had realized a few seconds before, when she had mentioned that they were ‘out of the zucchini burger’ that there would be no choices in meat.

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There was an awkward air as she explained there was no meat, but she didn’t have the English vocabulary to say, ‘This is a vegan restaurant.’ Somewhere around here, I noticed the little sign reading ‘Healthy Hot Chocolate, 3€!’

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The lady at the table behind us, who had watched this interaction take place, informed us that the quinoa burger had been featured in the newspaper the week before. That sealed the deal for us, confused and shameful as we were for mistaking the place for a juicy gourmet burger joint.

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It all turned out well, though. The burger was delicious, and we plan to try to recreate it when we get back to Seattle! We brought it back home so as not to further disturb the tiny Dutch women, and we rounded it off with a bottle of sparkling cider.

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Sunday = Amsterdam Funday.

That tall archaic-looking building in the distance is what Jackson called the “Dutch Notre Dame.” Pretty sure there’s no such thing, but we didn’t have enough time to check it out and confirm/ disprove his theory.

Cute little truck, just my size

Some bikes and some neon string-art over a canal. (At one point we found a bike parked vertically on a bridge, but hanging over the water instead of on the street-side of the barrier. So strange.)

I love this shot. I wanted it to be the main photo for this post, but I just love the Amsterdam letters. Struggles.

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First on the list for the day was the Anne Frank house.

The view from the street the Frank family lived on

A tower nearby

Pictures weren’t allowed in the house and museum, so this is one of the only things I managed to snap: just one of the many flights of steep, steep stairs.

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The experience was very moving and educational. I have mostly avoided the story of Anne Frank because when I was younger, especially around her age during her diary writings, I thought it was extremely intrusive of her privacy that millions of people around the world poured over her innermost thoughts without her knowledge. I was personally offended on her behalf when a few of the boys in my eighth grade class read her diary as part of a book group. However, after seeing the museum, my views have changed. I learned that she had dreams of becoming a famous writer, and she even wanted to publish a book about her time in the Annex. I suppose it is quite a miracle that her dreams came true even after her death. I may try to read her book after all, which aside from her diary, includes some short stories and parts of the novel she had started.

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I teared up once, when we were in her tiny bedroom that she shared with a grown man, and I read this quote of hers on the wall: “I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I’m free,” which she wrote on a Christmas Eve while trapped in the Annex.

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Then we found this Cow Museum, and I really wanted to get one for my Aunt Mel, who has a slight cow obsession, but they weren’t open yet!

Some Liberties? Is this signifying the end of freedom?

Pretty bridges, AKA: the view from The Bench.

NOT The Bench

Across the water from The Bench

Living out our little infinity <3

For comparison. It’s the real place! (We’re nerds, by the way. I pre-ordered TFIOS over six months before it was released. #DFTBA)

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After this little adventure, we made our way haphazardly to a burger joint, and all went downhill from there.

The meal started off nice with another delicious hot chocolate

And our burger arrived. Still in the clear. But after I cut the burger in half, gave Jackson his half, and took my first bite, I found myself magically and inexplicably coated in the aforementioned chocolate, which was thankfully no longer hot. I’m not sure how it happened, but Jackson managed to ultimately throw the entire glass on top of me, my food, and all of my possessions. The longer I watched it, the farther it reached, until I had to stand up to avoid its path. One of the servers ran over with a roll of paper towels, and I had to run to the bathroom to wash out my phone, my shirt, my skirt, and my boots. By the time I got back to the table, the mess had been cleaned and our hot chocolate had been replaced. Apparently Jackson had said, “You trust me with another one?” to which the waiter replied, “Just keep it away from her.” HOW DARE HE ASSUME. Gah. Men.

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Some street art

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Next, we made our way to the Van Gogh Museum, which was basically the only activity Jackson was interested in.

The ice rink outside the Van Gogh Museum. The entire top layer was water, so it looked like they were all skating on a pond rather than a frozen sheet of ice, and half of the skaters were pushing around these classy, green wooden chairs.

“I amsterdam”

Jackson = way too excited about Van Gogh

Pictures weren’t allowed inside the exhibits, but they were really neat! I actually preferred the small set-up in Musee d’Orsay, but I think that is because the works there were really concentrated on his later, Impressionistic works, while the Van Gogh Museum had a lot of his earlier (and less-expressive) works.

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Then it was time to make our sad journey back to the train station….

Here’s that crazy bike parking I was talking about

This one’s for you, Mom. Me and Johnny. It took about ten minutes to get this picture taken without me laughing.

Giant wooden shoes!

One last canal

“The best cookie in Amsterdam.” It was the only cookie we had while we were there, besides the stroopwaffles, but it was indeed delicious. Three types of chocolate, and stuffed with more chocolate. Can’t go wrong there! As far as I could tell, these bad boys were the only thing that bakery made!

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We finally made it to the airport, where Jackson said goodbye (twice, because I went to the wrong security check the first time), and we parted ways until he comes home from Trondheim

Another strange airport restroom sink

I finally got around to flipping through Norwegian’s in-flight magazine, and it made me sad I hadn’t sooner! So many quirky stories and activities to do in Europe that I’ll have to wait for, now! But check out this hilarious little picto-graphic. Denmark is the tiny little blip on the far left. So flat! Can’t wait to see Mt. Rainier on my ride home in a couple days!

The lights of Copenhagen as we came in for landing

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Alright. That was the Netherlands. Lots of fun, lots of food, lots of walking, much like my other trips abroad. I’LL MISS IT SO MUCH. I’m currently sitting amidst all of my packing paraphernalia, trying to figure out how to fit it all and stay under the weight limit. Ugh. I have some last-minute adventures planned tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll have time to write a last blog post or two. See you soon, Mama!!!

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Venlig hilsen/ best regards,

Lizzy-wa