Amsterdam in a day

Our flight landed at 5:30am and we had our bags and had gone through customs by 6am! It was very smooth and easy to get through the airport that early. We purposely found a hotel within walking distance from the airport. Our flight the next day leaves at 6:30 am to get down to Italy. This hotel was awesome when we walked in, very modern and very helpful. All of their signs have funny sayings and their rooms are very clean, futuristic, and Ikea like. We paid a little extra to check in early and get a hot shower before our day started. That was a great decision! The room has a single remote that controls the whole room, tv, temperature, blinds, lights, ect. It's crazy awesome...so needless to say we didn't get out of the hotel until around 8:30 after we played around with the room features.

In this picture I am standing with my back to the door and to the left is the toilet and the right is the shower with the bed flush to the back of the room...it's tight but that's normal for a total in Europe. The shower is a rain shower which was pretty neat. 

Then it was off to explore Amsterdam. We went straight to the tourist center to buy an iamsterdam card which gave us free public transportation and entrance to over 10 museums and a boat cruise. We thought that was a good deal...until we found out the train from the airport to the main part of the city wasn't covered.... All in all we got our money's worth in the ticket but would advise others to think twice before getting it if staying near the airport. Amsterdam is beautiful and has a very unique feel. The first thing we noticed when we got off was holy bikes.....whoa we had never seen so many bikes in our lives. This town we found out has as many bikes as people. 

This platform next to the free ferry holds 1,100 free parking spots for bikes. We stepped out at rush hour and almost got flatted by bikes not cars...yikes we learned quick to look both ways before crossing any streets.

Justin was adventurous and convinced me to walk to the museums from the central station...in hindsight that was great because we wandered through the back residential side of Amsterdam. The city is built so close to water that they have many canals and also many houseboats and regular boats on these canals. They do not have gondolas....that's Venice :). 

House boats on either side with the river cruise we took going through the middle.

We saw the Vincent van Gough museum which was very cool. It had many of his early pieces and really did a good job of showing his progression of an artist and how he learned from other artists. He used many tools to help him with perspectives and drew grids on paintings and sketches that he was copying for practice. The only let down was that his starry night piece was not in the collection. 

It was very interesting but this museum is where both Justin and I lost steam....we were soo tired from not sleeping on the plane and getting up early for our flight. We pushed through with coffee and sweets. :)

Next we decided to go on a riverboat tour an rest our legs. It was a little over an hour and took us through the canals and pointed out famous houses and districts. The fact that we walked along one of the main canals to get to the museums was nice because we had seen the sights before and could recognize them and appreciate what they actually were. We both dosed off during the tour and took turns kicking each other to wake up. After the tour we picked up some souvenirs and made our way to the houseboat museum which is something I really wanted to see. It was a houseboat that had been in full use until the late 1990's until it was used exclusively as a museum. It showed how a family of four could live in one of them, honestly it was tight but not any tighter than a single wide trailer. 

Then in our way back we picked up another delicious and nutritious snack...a Belgian specialty but we saw multiple stand with fries and mayo....best fries I've had in a long time.

Justin is a great guide and really learns cities well, I'm glad I'm traveling with him!

After our snack we made our way back to the airport and to the hotel. The plan was to sleep until dinner and get up eat and go back to sleep....currently it's 11:30pm and I woke up about an hour ago, chose to blog and will go back to sleep so our plan didn't work. We have to get up at 3am for our flight to Naples tomorrow where we will rent a car and arrive in Rome around lunch tomorrow.

Bye bye Amsterdam!