Day 18- Amsterdam and Germany

Monday, May 10 (Day 18)

We were in Amsterdam again today. We met for breakfast at 7am and got on the bus and left for the city at 8am. We had until 12 to wander around the city. We went to the Anna Frank house and it was amazing—much bigger than I expected. Walking around the house was very moving. At the end of the exhibit there was a room about Otto Frank, Anne’s dad, and how his plan was to rid the world of discrimination. That was one of the reasons that he published Anne’s diary.

After the museum, we walked around the city. We were trying to find the rich district to see the houses and buildings there.
Many of the shops were closed because they open later on Mondays… what a party city! Haha

I wanted to walk by the red district again to see what it was like during the day. We didn’t make it, but I was told that it is open 24 hours. So weird!

We grabbed some food at Subway and hopped back on the bus to head to Germany. On the bus, we all individually introduced ourselves. Afterwards, I tried to sleep on the bus but it is SO hard! We stopped at a rest stop and I asked the lady at the counter what a certain flavor was and she started ringing me up. I told her I just wanted to know the flavor and she started speaking this foreign language to me. I didn’t realize we were already in Germany!!

We got to St. Goar in Germany, the Rhine Valley, around 6pm. This is where the first kookoo-clock was made, the land of the teddy bear, and originators for Birkenstocks shoes. The Germans are also the third biggest beer drinkers behind by the Czech and Irish, and castles and wine (ice wine) are very famous here.

We saw a few shops before checking into our hotel- Birkenstock, a beer stein store, and the first teddy bear shop. We checked into our hotel and were given a real key! No swipe key. It is SO beautiful here! You can see castles on the top of mountains and the flowers against the river in the background were just beautiful! We met for dinner around 7 (some kind of meat sliced, noodles, peas and carrots that we all got 3 extra servings of, and a cherry, chocolate cake for dessert.

After dinner we went to take a walk around outside along the Rhine River. It was really nice. Then we saw a castle on top of a mountain semi-close to us and we decided to go up to it because it said “hotel” on its side and we wanted to check out the lobby. We stopped at a gelato place on the way, and again, took me right back to when we were Rome.

On our way, we stopped in the cellar where the wine tasting was going on. That was kinda cool. Then we made our way up the very steep hill to the top where the castle hotel was. The view was spectacular!!! We could see all of the small town of St. Goar, the Rhine Rover, and the other castles that were now at our level but across the river.

After wandering around the castle for a while (we couldn’t find the lobby and it was getting dark) we headed back to our hotel. When we got there, everyone was down in our hotel lobby drinking, smoking, and playing games but we decided to go up to our rooms and go to bed early. We ended up in bed by 11:45pm-- probably the earliest the 5 of us have gone to sleep since we arrived in Europe! It was very relaxing.