Amsterdam, Etc: Part 1 (What I Saw)

After almost a month and a half, I am finally writing about my trip to Europe! Woohoo! I’ve been putting this off because I am lazy and I didn’t want to sort through all my photos and figure out what to write. It already took me like 10 minutes just to write these last two sentences. I wasn’t sure how to write a travel post – whether or not someone would want to read each day extensively (maybe if I was a more humorous writer the mundane things of travel would seem interesting to read) or just the highlights, but if it’s just the highlights then most likely the vast number of photos I took would go unposted. And then, there are just way too many photos to stick into one post. Plus, we went to different cities, but maybe didn’t stay in certain places long enough to properly give recommendations to anyone going there for the first time.

All that long intro to say that what I decided on was not recapping each day individually because I think that’d be boring, not just doing highlights because there was actually not a ton that especially stood out, but instead just doing a general overview of what I saw, what I did, and what I ate. In three separate posts. Probably these posts will still be all over the place, but maybe next time I travel I’ll have a better idea of how to write travel posts. (#content)

So, first stop – Amsterdam! When we first arrived in the main part of the city, I kept on saying and thinking how picturesque the canals and bridges and small streets are. This feeling did not go away for the duration of the trip. I took many, many photos of the canals. There were moments during the trip when we were trying to kill time where we just sat by the canal and that was super nice, too. We also saw a lot of bikes. I forgot, a lot of times, to check for bikes before crossing the street a few times, which led to almost getting run over, like a dumb tourist.

I felt like Amsterdam (and the other cities we visited) were pretty small, and the famous buildings and monuments and assorted historical things were all within walking distance, so it was easy to just see them all in one go – for example, the I Amsterdam sign that was outside of the Rijksmuseum. I’m glad that we had other things to do besides just sightseeing historical things, because otherwise we would have run out of things to do a lot faster. This is also how I feel about New York.

This was especially the case when we went to Belgium, where we spent about a day and a half in Brussels and a day in Bruges. Bruges is a city where you can definitely see everything worth seeing in less than a day, and although the cathedrals and other important buildings are quite grand in Brussels, I felt satisfied with the amount of time we spent there.

From top to bottom, some scenes from Brussels: the beautiful ceilings and some more alleyways at the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, the Grand Palace (which we had to view from the side because the front was closed! Apparently there are very limited visiting hours), the inside and outside of the Cathedrale de Saint-Michel, the gilded buildings of the Grand Place (oddly this was hard to find, and we weren’t sure exactly what we were looking for, but once we got there – we knew we had gotten there!), and last but not least, the Manneken Pis, which is strangely a symbol of Brussels.

We happened to be in Brussels the day that the Belgium team was returning from the World Cup, which meant that there were a lot of people in the main parts of town! It was hectic and exciting to see everyone so enthusiastic about their team. There were screens put up around town so that people could watch the bus returning, and there were Belgian jerseys everywhere (you can see the crowds in the screen in the photo above).

Coming up tomorrow – more of what we did in Amsterdam!