Today we had the whole day to do whatever we wanted. Well, we could have gone to the conference and attended some sessions, but…yeah. We decided to do some quintessential tourist things and go to some museums. In the morning we walked over to the Rijksmuseum. This is a huge, huge buildings but most of it has been under construction since 2004. There is one wing open at the moment that has an exhibition called “The Masterpieces.” It had some artifacts relating to Dutch history such as Delft ware, which is blue and white pottery- I guarantee you have seen it before. There were also a ton of paintings by a bunch of artists such as Vermeer and Rembrandt. The most famous painting there is The Night Watch, which is actually pretty big. I really don’t think the price to get into the museum would have been worth it without that painting. After going through the museum, we went to this restaurant next to it called the Cobra. Funny story about that, so we get to the door of the restaurant and I try to pull open the door, but it doesn’t open. I figure I am trying the wrong door, so I start going downstairs but realize that is just where the bathroom is. I come back up, and I am just standing there feeling all stupid that I have no idea what is going on. As we are standing there (it was me, Marissa and John by the way), some man walks in, goes to the door, and pushes the door open. Yeah, I felt really stupid. But we got inside the restaurant and ate, so it all worked out. Although I did accidentally order something I didn’t mean to, but that was ok. It was called a beef kroket, and it was basically like a mozzarella stick except instead of having cheese inside it has minced beef. Kind of a weird idea, but it tasted good. After eating we walked back to our hotels to take a little break and to get my tram pass, which I would need later and I had forgotten that morning because I was an idiot.
After this we got on the tram again and rode to the Van Gogh museum. I was expecting this to be a lot cooler than it actually was. It was essentially a 3-story museum of art, but only one of them was actually Van Gogh paintings. There were some cool paintings, but the most famous ones I had really seen before and remembered there were his self-portrait (there were actually a bunch of these), Sunflowers, The Bedroom, The Potato Eaters, and Wheatfield under Thunderclouds. There were more, but nothing super famous. I was really hoping Starry Night would be there, but I found out it is actually at a museum in New York. So sad. So that was that with the museum. We then trammed over to Spui (how to say that is still up for debate) and found our way to one of the canals to take a canal boat tour. We got discount tickets from the conference, which was pretty awesome. We took a nice round-trip ride for about an hour. We saw all kinds of really cool buildings- my favorite were the old-school Amsterdam mansions which really just look like a bunch of their regular houses all put together. We also saw a bunch of interesting bridges, which is understandable since we were riding in the canals.
My favorite spot was as we were going past this one bridge, if you looked straight down you could see I think it was 7 more bridges that were parallel to it and looked the same. It was a cool sight. We also took some SUPER attractive pictures, which I will share with you below. So after the canal tour we basically trammed back to the hotel and got some food. We were planning to watch a movie, but as so often happens with college students, we ended up watching YouTube videos and piddling our time away. It was great fun.
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