Half A Day In Rotterdam

This morning we headed to Rotterdam, the second largest municipality in the Netherlands and home of the largest port in Europe.  We had originally planned to overnight here and catch a ferry from the nearby town, Hoek van Holland, to England tomorrow morning, but last week we realized we miscounted the number of days we’ve been in the EU so we had to cancel our reservation and take the overnight ferry tonight or risk getting caught for overstaying our welcome and be banned from Schengen Agreement countries!

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More Dim Sum :)

Today for our last day in Amsterdam, we headed to the last major tourist sight we haven’t been to – Ann Frank’s house.  Unfortunately, like yesterday, we started off with bad luck because after waiting in line for 45 minutes to buy tickets, we got to the front and found out their credit card machines weren’t working and we didn’t have enough cash on us for the tickets!  When we couldn’t find the ATM the girl at the ticket office directed us to, we decided to skip Ann Frank’s house and headed straight to Chinatown for our final dim sum meal – and this time we knew the correct name of the restaurant my aunt was talking about after another phone call to her last night!

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Diiiimmm Suuummmm!!!

Because we felt like we scheduled ourselves for too many days in Amsterdam, these last two days have been rather uneventful and we decided to stay near the B&B to catch up on some sleep and explore the area we’re living in.  Today we headed out to continue our sightseeing, with a plan to catch a weekly free lunch concert at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam’s prized concert hall (every Wednesday from September to June you can hear the featured orchestra rehearse for the evening concert for free at 12:30 pm), and then head to Chinatown to try a dim sum restaurant that was recommended on the Internet.

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I Amsterdam

Our second day in Amsterdam was sadly Matt’s last day, so we jammed in as many things as we could fit in one day, starting with the famous I Amsterdam sign at Museumplein and the nearby Van Gogh museum… (more…)

First Day In Sin City

Yesterday night Paul and I sat at the reception desk after they closed the common rooms at 11 pm (another stupid policy of the hostel) because Wi-Fi doesn’t work in our room and there was nowhere else to sit when the common rooms closed.  Although the hostel makes it clear that reception isn’t 24 hours, people coming in and out kept asking us questions because they thought we worked there, which was amusing and led to a few random conversations.  Two of those people, Rosamond and Matt from Texas, ended up going out for beers with us when Paul finished work, and we ended up making Matt our travel buddy when we found out he was heading to Amsterdam today like us.  You know what they say – the more the merrier! (more…)