Yay! Finally in Amsterdam, three countries down, three to go. Well right now we are actually leaving Amsterdam, on our way to Munich. It is Wednesday,July 12, 2006 at 11:07 AM our time here. The train we are on has little outlets between the seats to plug our laptop into to charge, AWESOME. It gives me a chance to catch up on my journals. We arrived yesterday in Amsterdam on Monday, the 10th. The train pulled in about 7:30 PM Monday night and our plan was to go straight to the tram ticket counter, buy our 3 day pass and find our hotel as soon as possible. The tram ticket machine was located right as we walked off the train before heading outside, we grabbed our tickets and hopped on what we prayed would be our tram to the neighborhood of our hotel. It passed us through the main street in front of central station so were able to see a few places pass by that we wanted to come back to: different food places, shops, internet cafes, etc. Busting out our map, we figured out which stop ours would be and got off on the corner; took a right and then saw the sign for our hotel!! It was such relief! By the way we had previously changed our hotel reservations from the Flying Pig to this hotel, Hotel Barbacan, outside the city. The flying pig was right in the main city, near the red light district. Seeing we had all our cameras, computers, etc we decided we needed to change out of the hostel and find something a little not so crazy. This hotel was just fine for us, small rooms but overall nice and clean. After we checked in, we SHOWERED, and walked downtown around 9. We made it down there no problem, had KFC (only thing open we trusted at the moment), and hunted down an internet café to check our mail, accounts, etc. By the way, thank you so much for all the awesome messages and congrats, we love them! I can never wait to get to another café to see if we have any more messages! Anyways, we headed in early and passed out by 11, we hadn't slept in a bed in 3 days so it felt so great to have a mattress (ach and pain free night). The next morning we awoke and went downstairs for their breakfast that was included. It actually wasn't ½ bad. We had coffee, tea, a basket of different breads and jams, a hardboiled egg and a selection of meats and cheese. A nice lady served us so we were very pleased with the breakfast! After breakfast we hopped on the tram (which by the way is a GREAT and efficient transportation service. We had no problems with them at all and the stops we needed were very easy to find. Our first stop was the Anne Frank House. I had been there before, but much, much younger. I loved it this time and it brought back memories of the reading the book back in middle school. It was so interesting to walk through all the rooms that they were hidden in. We walked at our own pace and strolled through the house. They were some places where there were really steep stair cases to go up into the hiding areas (the bookcase was still there that hid the "secret annex"). After the Anne Frank House we decided to tram to the other side of town for the Van Gogh Museum. It was a little pricey (a little less than 10 euro each), but this museum had the whole history of his paintings written on the wall. It was extremely easy to follow and understand his increase of talent throughout his life. We had a good time in there, glad we got a chance to do it. We were tempting to buy a small print for 6 euro, but then decided we did not want to lug it all through Italy and Greece with us. Our third stop was the Heineken Experience!! This is on our top 3 fun things in Amsterdam for sure. We thought it would be a similar tour to the Whisky one, but we were defiantly wrong. First it took us through a brief history of who invented it, thought of the ideas, etc. Next, we were on to a room with all the ad's of the past, commercials, etc. By the way, each room and level is decorated so cool and super interactive. The stairs to go to each level were made of the green glass the bottles are made of! We even went into a virtual stimulation machine where we stood on a platform and watched a movie. It made us feel like we were the bottles going through the process of being filled, labeled, boxed up, and delivered. It was really fun! Another perk of the Heineken Experience was the 3 free drinks and gift at the end! There was the first bar after the bottling experience where we got our first Heineken. We then went through a few more interactive rooms where we played fooseball, pretended we were DJs, and sent a video message to our dads, HAHA. (If you would like to see it, I think I can forward it to you.) After the Heineken Experience the employee took a pic of us outside telling us to jump in the air as she took our pic, funniest picture EVER. Check our photo albums for it!! I'm sure you will get a kick out of it. We then headed to the famous pancake place we had read about in one of tour books for lunch. The whole menu was just pancakes tons of different fillings and toppings from strawberries to ham and cheese. They were really, really good, you will also see pictures of these monsters! Around 5 we had to go back to Central Station to book our trains for today, wanting an early train and not wanting to go through what we did back in Paris on the way to Amsterdam. Well this was a lovely system, not quite. This place we had to get a number ticket and sit in this room with teller windows and basically wait till our number comes up on the screen. Man, this was nuts. We sat for about 2hrs waiting for our number to be called. It went by rather fast because we met a girl sitting next to us from California. She was traveling alone, had originally gotten over to Europe to babysit for a family in Denmark (the family had houseswapped for a couple months). After she was done nannying she wanted to travel on her own and do a vacation likes ours. Her next stop was Paris and also Biarritz ( we aren't the only beach crazed people). We told her about the metro stations, places to eat, where not to go, etc. She was a sweetheart, talked our darn ears off though. For dinner we were going to try the big Indian type platters some of these restaurants had but decided for a different place instead. I believe it was called Wok to Walk. It was this tiny, tiny building with a menu written in steps. Number One: pick your noodles, or rice, or just veggies. Number Two: pick the meat and extra veggies (chicken, shrimp, mushrooms, etc). Number Three: pick your sauce (terayki, sweet and sour, garlic and black pepper, etc). I'm glad we saved our Chinese food experience for this place. It was so great! We took those to go and sat in Dam Square on the stairs with the hundreds of other people. This morning we woke up pretty early, had breakfast at 8:30 AM at the hotel and headed to the train station for our 10 o'clock train to Munich (stopping in Frankfurt where we have to switch, that should be fun). Tonight our plans are to arrive in Munich around 6 PM, check our big bags at the train station (because all day tomorrow we are doing a tour of the castle in Bavaria and have to check out of our room before the tour; when we arrive back from the tour we are getting a night train to Venice.) We will just bring our daypacks to the hotel with a change of clothes in it. Hopefully we will get to stop in at Biergarten tonight and get one of those famous huge mugs of beer and maybe a sampler of good German food to split. Well we are about ½ way through our trip now. We will be in Italy by the 14th and making our way to Greece on the 21st. Thinking of all of you and missing you!