Day 2 - 12 December 2019

We started the day with breakfast at the IBIS hotel. It was surprisingly quite good and we had our fill before we began the day.

After breakfast, we took the tram to our first destination of the day - Van Gogh Museum. It was interesting to read about his life as an artist, who never got famous until after his death. Among many of his works - the Sunflowers, the Bedroom, the self-portrait with bandaged ears, the Irises - stood out as some of his more prominent works. It was unfortunate that he went mad and eventually took his own life and after his death, he was being recognised as one of the greatest artist that went on to impact future generations of artists. The tour around the museum was interesting as not only we admired his works, we also walked through his life as an artist until his death. His life dedication to art was inspiring.

Next, Le, Yu, H and my brother in law went to ice skate at ICE* Amsterdam. The rest of us either rested our legs, played games on iphone, or walked around its vicinity. The kids enjoyed themselves.

We had lunch at Lombardo’s. The portion of the signature burger was gigantic. As I was pretty hungry, I gobbled it up fairly quickly. It was more of satisfying the stomach than the taste bud.

Next, we visited Anne Frank museum which was about a story of a 16 year old girl who died in the concentration camp in 1945 during Nazi’s occupation of the Netherlands. She was best known for the diary which she had kept while she was in hiding for about 2 years in the Secret Annex before she was discovered and arrested. At the museum, I learnt that it was only months before they were liberated by the Russians and Anne was in the last train (among the last batch of people) that was taken to the concentration camp. If only she was not discovered on that fateful day.....

We did the Amsterdam Light Festival cruise as our last activity of the day. It was about an hour plus long and we could see beautiful light installations along the canal. The ride was slow and perhaps tired from the entire day, the kids all dozed off. Haha.

Dinner was back at IBIS hotel. As I didn’t feel hungry, I had tomato soup, Nachos and a glass of Affligem beer (from Belgium). Sweet ending.

And then, it was back to the hotel room to prepare for bedtime....