Amsterdam — Part Two - McKenzie Sue Makes

After a weekend in Berlin, we got back to Amsterdam with 3 full days left and we made sure to see everything we could before the end of the week! First up: Anne Frank House. We couldn’t take any photos inside, but it was a humbling experience to see the rooms that they lived in for two whole years during the war! I watched the 2009 movie on Netflix a few weeks before our trip and it made everything so much more real. Definitely a must see in Amsterdam. It is important to buy these tickets previously online and choose an early date before it gets super busy. We booked ours at 9:15 AM and it was a perfect time.

Right next door is a popular breakfast place called ‘Pancakes Amsterdam’ that we ate breakfast at. There are a number of these around the city and a few people recommended it to us. Since it was a high-tourist area, it was expensive at around $15 a pancake but they were pretty good pancakes. I got Apple Cinnamon and Ryan got Ham, Cheese, and Raspberry. He didn’t love his, he wasn’t expecting brie cheese. The hot chocolate was super yummy on a cool rainy morning!

Just another selfie for you all, we’ve got plenty more haha. Plus some more pretty Amsterdam buildings!

Next up was the Maritime Museum. It was all about boats and even had a cool ship you could walk through. Walking through the ship you could see how small some of the areas were, Ryan could barely fit through some of the doors!

He was a little kid at a park here. On his bucket list is riding in an large sail boat that doesn’t use any motors. I think he wanted to be a pirate when he was little 😉

Next was the Rijksmuseum! It was also expensive at $20 each but it’s one of those things you have to see while in Amsterdam. We saw more Frans Hals paintings, Vermeer’s, and Rembrandt’s which are all super impressive!

We stopped and got some fresh stroop waffles (we think the old stale ones were better!) and tried another unique Fanta: Peach! My favorite soda is Fanta Pineapple, trying it for the first time on our honeymoon in the Caribbean. I have NO idea why America doesn’t have these flavors, they are way better than the boring ones we have.

Earlier that day we had stopped at a tower and booked an appointment for the tour. The day before we had walked by it and were just too late to take the tour then so we wanted to make sure we got to it the next day. Definitely another cool thing to do while in Amsterdam! It was raining pretty bad while we were up there but it added to the beauty of the view.

One of my favorite parts of the trip for sure! There were multiple levels and over 180 steps of tightly wound stairs which was very cool to do. And also exhausting. After we got down, we decided it was time to do another ‘must do’ in Amsterdam: raw herring. In my opinion you can just skip right past this. Ryan wasn’t about to let me chicken out, especially since I didn’t have the excuse of being pregnant I was banking on. So he bought a fish and got out the go pro to video us. I am not a big fish person and of course after a few bites I embarrassingly gag a few times. We were cracking up and even Ryan had to hold back a gag or two. We can check that off the list, thank you!

The next morning we went early to the I Amsterdam sign and got the whole thing by ourselves! There were still a few other people but we all took our turns.