Amsterdam: a concise overview

Reasons why Amsterdam is cool:

Canals, bikes, bridges, WWII museums, ART, waffles, house boats, and waffles

Reasons why Amsterdam is not cool:

Bridge locks, bikes, and mascara prices

We started our Dutch exploration with waffles and ended it at the cute, local bakery. I could write a whole blog about why I love waffles, but stroopwaffles don't have some of the  more vital waffle qualities, like the ability to hold copious amounts of syrup or yogurt in the little squares. Instead, they are more like a sandwich of glorified cookies with melted caramel in between, which is a tasty combination lacking only chocolate drizzle and almond flakes.

We then waddled our waffled selves to the Rijks Museum and witnessed a Madonna and child where the portrayal of infant Jesus had serious muscle definition.

And there were Rembrandts for days! 

And the lovely, ribbon bow sash seems to have been the height of men's fashion. 

And by the fourth floor, I needed to find my favorite exhibit:

The Anne Frank Museum was really cool because it's the actual house where the Frank family hid, but I don't have any pictures. I'd say the Rijks Museum and the Anne Frank house were my favorite two, followed quickly by the Dutch Resistance Museum and quite distantly by the Van Gogh Museum. 

This is a map the German SS commissioned that points to the exact  location of Jewish residents in Amsterdam where each dot represents 10 Dutch Jews. By the end of the war, over 70 percent of Dutch Jews had been murdered. It was cool to hear actual recordings of Christian pastors risking their lives to speak out against the targeting of the Jews. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was Dutch!

This is an artist who has a whole museum dedicated to him, and at the end its three levels, it's a just a really depressing, kind of long testament to his ultimately unsuccessful search for significance in founding his worth on the respect of other artists. I do not recommend unless you really love Van Gogh or sad, sad stories.  

And this is my mom probably procuring a million diseases by drinking out of a public water fountain. 

All in all, Amsterdam was cool, but the drug/prostitution culture takes away from some of the history and art culture. It's a beautiful place to walk around during the day, but it doesn't have the same "strolling European streets at night" charm as Paris because it kind of devolves into a "club culture" that's loud and drunk, and there don't seem to be alternatives to the nightclub life.