Awaiting our much-needed salads for lunch. We were so full of cheese, stroopwafels, and fries with mayo sauces from Monday.
After the canal cruise we wandered around until our 5:15pm Anne Frank House entry time.
We enjoyed an outdoor canal-side cafe for lunch, the floating flower market, the Delft shop, and the Lego store (full of really cute Netherlands-themed builds). Dave met a salesman in the Lego store, Mark, who is as big a Lord of the Rings fan as he is; Mark showed Dave the colossal Minas Tirith he got to help build.
The Anne Frank House is a must see, and if you’re like me and hadn’t read the book in 40 years, I recommend the ticket that includes the 30 min introductory lecture. No photography inside the museum itself, but it’s quite powerful.
At the Bloemenmarkt Singel, which is about a kilometer south of the same canal from where we were staying. The shops are technically floating in the canal, but a lot of the products are on the sidewalks forward of the floating parts. So many bulbs! Unfortunately it’s very very difficult (and expensive) to bring them back to the U.S. Only a couple shops offered the U.S. certificates for flying them home.
The fresh flowers are pretty, too…quite autumnal.
At the Heinen Delfts Blauw gift shop near the Bloemenmarkt. They had classes where you could paint your own tile with their iconic blue paint, but you need to make a reservation for that. We were debating taking the train to Delft the next day, anyway, so we didn’t pursue the class in Amsterdam. (We ended up not going to Delft).Â
At the LEGO Store. This is a build of the Minas Tirith, a city in the Lord of Rings series. We’d heard about this kit, but this is the first time we had seen one built out.
Love this! Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” (the version that’s in Amsterdam).
This was an English Language introductory lecture to the Anne Frank House, which was really helpful before we toured the house. No photography in the house itself. I always thought the families were crammed into a teensy attic, but in reality, they had about 1500 sq. ft. of space for 8 people — the hard part was keeping quiet from 8am-5pm every work day for 2 years.
More cheese. Dinner at Kaasbar, with the “Cheese Train”. If a cheese you like goes by, you just help yourself (like those sushi conveyor belts in Japan).
