Amsterdam!

Yes!  First weekend trip with friends turns out to be a success.  As you can probably tell from the title, we went to Amsterdam and much chaos ensued.  We arrived Friday night at around 9 then went to our hostel to drop of our stuff.  We stayed on a boat, pictures soon to be uploaded, which was cramped in the room but it didn't matter, we were only in the hostel to sleep anyway so space wasn't required.  After we put our stuff down we went out to explore the town and grab dinner.  We roamed through the red light district for a bit to see what all the fuss was about then ended up at a place called the Grasshopper, a famous coffee shop/restaurant/bar and got a great omlette for dinner.  Afterwards we roamed again for a while going in and out of shops as we got bored finally ending in the Rookery, a really cool coffee shop with an African/Indian feel to it.  At around 12 we went to McDonalds because some of the party were hungry and we decided what to do from there.  In the end we decided to walk back because a lot of us were tired and didn't want to go all out on the first night.  After getting lost for an hour and a half we miraculously made it back to the hostel and promptly fell asleep.

The next day, Saturday, we woke up at 10 and went upstairs for breakfast where we chatted with the guy running the hostel over bread with meat and cheese.  At 10:30 we were all ready to go and took the tram over to the Anne Frank house which was awesome.  I had read the book in pieces because of school but going to the house refreshed all I had learned as well as adding some to my memory bank.  Very cool to see and walk through the places Anne describes in her story and read quotes from her book on the walls.  There was also a long case with pages from her actual diary with both Dutch and English translations next to them which was awesome.  After we got out of the museum we ran into another group of people that was there (there were 18 of 20 total LMU kids in Amsterdam plus a couple kids from the Texas group), and we all went to the Heineken brewery.  For 15 Euro we got to go on a walk through with a couple lead parts (employees explaining how things worked) and two free beers at the end.  All in all, it was a really cool tour.  On it I found the most comfortable seat I've ever sat on in my life.  That might have been because I had been walking and standing all morning (probably 5 or 6 hours at that point) but it was still awesome, I took a picture of myself sitting in it through the mirror.

After we got out of the brewery, we all were walking to dinner when we were approached by a guy inviting us to a pub crawl.  A couple people in our group had been on one before and thought we should do it so, after getting the information on where and when to meet we decided to go.  We split off into smaller groups for dinner then going back to freshen up before arriving at the first pub at 9:30.  In total we went to 5 pubs before we decided to head back.  The whole crawl promised to bring us to 5 pubs and a club (the club being the final destination) with free entrance and a free drink at each place but none of us had the energy for the club by 2 am when we left.  We then walked back to the hostel arriving at 3 then, as you probably guessed, passed out almost immediately.

Sunday we woke up again at 10 for breakfast then relaxed until 12 while people got ready at a comfortable pace.  All we had planned for the day was the Van Gogh museum then getting on the train by 9 pm so no one was in a rush which was nice.  The Van Gogh was another good experience, I had no idea that he only painted for 10 years of his life but in those 10 years created something like 500 paintings and 1500 sketches.  The museum has 200 paintings, 1000 sketches and 700 letters he wrote to his brother.  After the museum we roamed around town being touristy for a while taking pictures and looking through gift shops.  Finally we went back to our room to collect our things and headed to the train station to wait for our train.  I finally walked into my room at 1 am, unpacked the bare minimum and fell asleep.