Amsterdam

After classes finally finished, we spent our final weekend ( my birthday weekend) in Amsterdam. Some of the girls took me out to dinner near our hostel and I got really delicious ribs and fries.After dinner we kind of just spent the night exploring Amsterdam. The next day was much more exciting. We started off by taking a walking tour of the city. We learned all about the history of Amsterdam and saw the canals. We learned some really interesting things, like the reason many of the buildings are tilted towards the middle of the street. They used to build houses and stores that way so that if you wanted to move something large into the upstairs you could swing it in through and upstairs window instead of trying to fit it up the narrow stairs.

 Then we went to the Anne Frank house where she hid during the Holocaust. The house was very different from what I was expecting. I thought that the secret annex would be really small and a terrible place to live, but the annex is actually really big. Of course being stuck in there for years would make it feel small, but it really seemed like a decent place to live if you weren't living in hiding. After seeing the Anne Frank House, we went on a redlight district tour. We thought the tour would be really shocking, but honestly it wasn't. It was about as much as you would expect from Amsterdam.

 The next day I went to see the Heineken Brewery. It's not the actual brewery anymore, and it's really more of a museum, but it was really cool. One of the most interesting things I saw was something called the WOBO. It's basically Heineken bottles that were made so they could interlock and be used to make walls. They were made because someone who worked for Heineken saw how poverty could affect people and he wanted to create and affordable, sustainable way to build homes for them. And he did it by designing these beer bottles.

And finally, after 9 weeks away from home and traveling through 6 countries, it came time for me to head back to America. Being in Europe was incredible and I experienced more than many people ever get to. But being away from home for so long made me appreciate America and being American more than I ever had before.