A group of myself and 9 other girls travelled to Amsterdam and it was so much fun! The town is more cosmopolitan than Granada, but still has a kind of small town feel, especially since you can walk pretty much everywhere. The city is also busting with museums which is where we spent most of our time.

We woke up early one morning to get in line for the Anne Frank House, which is where Anne Frank and her family hid for 2 years before they were discovered. However in donating the house and making it a museum, Anne's father (the only one who survived the war) stipulated that he wanted it to stay free of furniture to remind of those who lost everything and never came home. It was an amazing museum walking through where they lived for two years, never able to walk around during the day for fear of workers downstairs hearing them. Oh and I don't think I'll ever complain about the size of my dorm room again.

Another museum we visited was the Rijksmuseum, which was just completely renovated a couple of years ago. Of all the museums this was my favorite. It was an art museum but all of the paintings were connected to Amsterdam or the Netherlands in some way. They did a really great job in the little descriptions of not only describing the pieces, but why they were important to the history of the Netherlands. Even as just an art museum I learned a lot about the history of the country, and they had some pretty great pieces.

The Van Gogh Museum was next on our list and this one was kind of underwhelming. Forgetting that Starry Starry Night was on display in NYC, I was excited the whole time to see it, only to get to the top floor and realize it wasn't there. The one cool thing they did was they organized all of his pieces chronologically, so you really got a sense of the kind of life Van Gogh had through his art. After he was released from a mental institution, Van Gogh produced around 70 works in the last 60 days of his life - which is pretty amazing. He also wrote lots of letters to his brother, who sold his art, some of which they had on display.

After hitting all the big museums, we did what's called the "Beer Bike". Its basically a big table with bicycle seats on either side with pedals. Our really awesome driver, Pepper, took us all around the city. Oh and as the name says, there was a little keg so we could all enjoy some beer while we biked. I have to say this was one of the highlights of the trip. Pepper was a really cool guy and he taught us quite a bit about the city. He also said that we were on a "historic ride" because the bikes are probably going to be illegal pretty soon. They're too big to fit in the bike lanes so we drive on the street and that thing does not move very fast. At all. So there were a couple of unhappy drivers behind us. But it was still tons of fun.

Oh and how could I forget to talk about the food. The cheese there is out of this world. There was a little street fair market thing one day and I took all the free samples I could get! I guess you could say the cheese queen was impressed.

We were only there for a few days but I feel like we did so much and saw so much and it was a really great experience!