Off To Finland: Eurotour

The morning was spent driving to the Netherlands! When I think of the Netherlands, I think canals and windmills and cows everywhere but no country can be as cool as it is in the movie's can it? IT WAS! We stopped at a little cheese and clog factory and watched a guy who was wearing converse clogs give a short demonstration on how to make clogs. We then got to attack the souvenir store before spending some time taking pictures in the giant clog. We had a short talk on how they make cheese too and we got to have a bit of a taste of all the nice cheeses. There was one covered in garlic and olive oil and it was so good. We went down to the beach next where we were having lunch but we got to run through all the little stores first. So many cool things and I have no idea how I didn't buy everything! We had lunch and then drove to Amsterdam, really cool city! Definitely one of my favourites that we visited.

First we went on a boat tour through the canals and the guide told us all about why they built the houses they way they did and a bit of the history of the city. There is a big sort of hook thing that extends from the top of most of the houses and that was so that when people moved they could put their furniture in the higher levels because the staircases were much too thin. There was also two sets of doors into most of the houses, one for the owners of the house and one, which was normally lower than the other, for the servants to enter the house. There were lots of house boats tied to the sides of the canals and people live in their house boats all year round! They were very different to Australian houseboats!

Then we swapped groups and I got to spend some time in the Anne Frank museum which was chilling but a really good experience. Our hotel was quite a way out of the city and it was dark and freezing when we got there so we were not happy to hear that they hadn't gotten our key-cards ready and we had to wait ages to finally get inside! I went to take a shower and had a brief moment of "whoa how the heck do I work this thing" before I realised that it was just like an Australian shower and I had grown so used to Finnish showers which are so much easier to regulate.