Today I booked another tour for me to go on since I missed my Brussels one on Tuesday. Since the Brussels one was only available certain days I decided to do the North Holland tour with a visit to the enclosing dike. I got up bright and early and hopped on the tram to the city centre. The tram system here is super easy to use & if you just Google map where you need to go & click transit it will tell you exactly what trams you can take where but basically if you’re going to the city centre you hop on any that say Centraal Station, there are quite a few.
Anyways, we boarded the bus and today’s tour was a much smaller group of people in comparison to the 70-80 people that were on my last tours, so it was kind of nice. We first headed off to the enclosing dike which is 30km long and connects the province of North Holland with the province of Freisland. It was built in 1933. To be honest this kind of just looked like a long highway to me but our tour guide didn’t do a very good job at explaining it so perhaps I would’ve been more impressed if I fully understood what went on to build this dike.
After that we headed to the small town of Medemblik and visited a working mill which we got to climb up to the top of, which was really cool. We then had a short tour through this town then were left to explore on our own. The town was super small so it was hard to fill up all the free time that our tour guide gave us, which is usually rare. We then boarded an old steam train which took us on about an hour long ride to the town of Hoorn. This town was a lot bigger & had a lot of really cool architecture. I stopped at a bakery for lunch and had the most delicious ham & cheese fresh croissant.
Once we got back to Amsterdam I made my way to the Anne Frank House. I had pre-booked my ticket online as everywhere I read that this was the one place that the line will be huge and they were right. Having my online ticket I didn’t have to wait in a line at all. So think ahead & book I’m advance unless you want to waste part of your day standing in line. I had mixed feelings about going to this, I heard from some that it was amazing and others that it was super boring & not much to see. Well there really wasn’t too much to see, you don’t walk in and are overwhelmed with a million things to look at but the whole concept of just being in the house. Seeing where & how these families were in hiding. The dim lighting of the house make you feel so claustrophobic and that’s in a house without all the furniture, I don’t know how they did it. It was eye opening & I left in awe. The whole idea of Nazis and the holocaust has always blown my mind but to see a piece of history & what these people had to go through was the weirdest feeling. I had never actually read the Diary of Anne Frank but picked myself up a copy in the bookstore on my way out. I wonder why books like that aren’t forced on kids to read in school as oppose to all those god awful books that teach you nothing that they make you read instead.
Anyways, I then decided to walk home instead of take the tram and got back to my hotel around 8:30. It’s crazy that as I’m writing this it’s almost 10pm and so bright outside you would think it was 7pm. No wonder I can’t get used to this time change.
withlovexo
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