Olli took Lukas and me to Amsterdam for my birthday weekend this past weekend. It was wonderful! Amsterdam is a very pretty place with so many canals running through the city and such quaint houses all over. We took a boat ride one morning and then went to the Van Gogh museum and saw some of his most famous paintings including "Starry, Starry Night" among others. On my actual birthday, we went walking in some beautiful parks and Lukas played on a nearby playground. That afternoon we visited the Anne Frank house and saw the Secret Annex where her family and four other people hid for over two years before being discovered, arrested and sent to concentration camps. It was a wonderful getaway for sure!
Lukas on our bed at the hotel drinking his milk just before getting ready to go to sleep.
Lukas with his Papa.
A view of one of the many canals in Amsterdam.
A closer look at some of the boats that were docked on the sides of the canals.
Lukas and Olli on the boat tour that we took the first morning we were in Amsterdam.
A view of the houses along the canals. The houses are so tall and skinny because the taxes on the land on which each house was built was extremely high. So people tended to build upwards instead of outwards.
However, because the houses are so small and many of them are right on the canal, furniture must be moved into the houses through the windows. This is why there are hooks on the gables at the top of each house as you can see here.
You can see a house leaning a bit forward in the middle of this photo. The house was built like this on purpose to help with the weight of hanging pieces of furniture during moves and it have the added benefit that it sometimes protected the lower part of the house from rain!
The house in the middle of this photo is the house where Anne Frank and her family hid during the part of the war. The front of the house comprised of a warehouse and offices for her dad's business. The Secret Annex is attached to the back of the house and is not visible from the street.
Taxes on cars are extremely high in Amsterdam, which is why there are over 250,000 bicycles in Amsterdam (or so I read)!
2 comments:
Oh yeah, Amsterdam is just simply lovely in Spring... did you go to visit Keukenhof the tulip gardens?
No, unfortunately, we missed the tulip gardens by one day! We walked through a flower market instead and, although not nearly as beautiful, it was still quite interesting to see all the many different types of flowers they were growing and selling.
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