We took the bus from Brussels to Amsterdam at noon and arrived later in the day. We then had to take another train to get to Amsterdam City Center, to be closer to where our hostel was. We stayed at Intersail, which was a boat hostel. The area it was in had a lot of boats docked where people could stay. We wanted to drop our bags off at our hostel and then get dinner. Our room had 4 bunk beds in it, except they weren't really bunk beds. They were more like wood planks with a thin mattress on them, basically on top of each other, so the bottom bunk looked really claustraphobic. The 4 of us couldn't all stand in the room at the same time either, so it was definitely an experience. We went to Vapiano for dinner. It was an Italian restaurant (Amsterdam isn't really known for their food) that was a self-serve concept. There was a line for pasta, pizza, and salads and appetizers, and you could go up and order what you wanted and the cooks would make it right in front of you. I ordered a homemade whole grain pasta with roasted tomatoes and feta cheese. The food was really good and it was a cool concept. We then went back to our hostel to get situated and sleep so we could have the full day ahead of us on Saturday. Saturday morning, we had breakfast on our boat. The spread was actually a lot better than we expected. There was coffee, tea, and juice, and then toast with different spreads, hard boiled eggs, and salami and cheese. We then headed over to the Anne Frank House. It was about a half hour walk from where we were staying, and it felt like zero degrees. We waited for over 2 hours in line to get in, since it was a crowded Saturday. None of us could feel our bodies by the time we got inside, but we were so glad we got to see the house. It was where Anne and her family actually stayed and we got to walk through where her room was, and there were all quotes from the book around the house. Her actual diary was in the center of the room at the very end of the walk-through as well. Unfortunately, we couldn't take pictures inside. We then ate lunch in the cafe that was part of the museum, just because none of us were ready to walk outside into the cold yet. When we were finally thawed out, we walked over to see the Van Gogh museum, which was another half hour from where we were. On the way, we saw the I Amsterdam sign, a big tourist attraction, and took some pictures there. The Van Gogh museum was really cool to see, we honestly could've spent all day in it. There were three floors each with a different theme/setup. We then headed back toward our hostel area, since it was already around 5pm. We got to walk through a lot of the pretty canal areas by the water on our walk back. The amount of bikes parked along the fences, as well as people riding bikes, looked to be more than actual cars. We went back to Vapiano for dinner that night and got pizzas. I got a pizza with bruschetta on top, and then we all splurged on dessert. We ended up really liking the restaurant. We then went back to our hostel to figure out our plan for leaving early the next morning. We had to wake up before 7am to catch a train to our bus to head back to Belgium. We were flying out of Zaventem Airport again (the prices were a lot better than flying out of Amsterdam). We missed the first train to take us to our bus, so the one we got on was supposed to arrive at our bus station the time our bus was supposed to leave. We had to sprint to our bus and we ended up getting on a different bus that was going to the same destination since our bus was leaving. We were supposed to arrive in Belgium at 10:45am, but our driver seemed to have other plans for us. He kept stopping for breaks (since the final destination for this bus was actually London), and was definitely driving way under the speed limit. We didn't end up getting to Belgium until 12:30 when our gate for our flight back to Dublin closed at 1:15pm. We had to sprint to the next train to get us to Zaventem airport and sprint to get to security. We somehow made it and were the last people on the plane by some miracle. We barely ate for the day and were all sweaty so we couldn't wait to get back. We also made our bus on time to go back to Dublin, so we had another three hour bus ahead of us. We basically spent over 8 hours on bus that day, so getting home and showering was the best feeling in the world. We got to see some really different stuff over the weekend and we all really enjoyed the trip. It's cool to see the different architecture from country to country. Also, in Belgium and Amsterdam, Dutch and French were mostly spoken, so we had some serious issues reading signs and hearing the announcements over public transportation. It's interesting to have more countries to compare now, so I'm really looking forward to continuing to travel.

On Thursday in Belgium we walked 9.85 miles, on Friday we walked 8.65 miles, Saturday was 8.5 miles, and Sunday was only 3.42 miles (mostly sitting on transportation).