Oh Amsterdam

Oh man, so behind! I'm going to be good and try to catch up for the past couple weeks.

After Matt got the internship, we started thinking and planning where we wanted to go visit while over here. One of the first places that I knew I wanted to go was to see the tulips in The Netherlands. I started researching and finding out where to go and how to get there. I was pretty excited to see that tulip season goes until late May and the website of the big place said things are still in full bloom come May.We decided that in order to be safe, we'd go the first weekend we had available. We started to worry a little because so many of the people here in Frankfurt told us how worried they were that the tulips would be gone, but we checked the website again and it said it is still going strong.


That morning, we took off early to catch our 6 o'clock bus to the train station. Once there we wandered around and wondered why train stations always have the dome roof until our train arrived. Before we knew it, we were on our way!

Matty is excited and ready for his first experience traveling by train

A few hours later, we pulled into Amsterdam and headed out to Kuekenhof (where the tulips are). We hopped on the waiting bus and watched as a few people run on a giant hamster wheel. Apparently they are having people run in that thing nonstop for a year as a cancer awareness/fundraiser thing? The bus driver was super friendly as blasting all sorts of tunes while singing a long. I figured she was so happy because she is such a frequent visitor to the tulips.

After a short bus ride, we excitedly entered the park. We were surprised to see so many tulips lining the paths but not actually planted. We figured they were just replacing some of the tulips that had seen better days. We were surprised though that after the entrance, the boxes disappeared and there were no tulips!

So instead of thisand this

We had

This

and this.

At first we were sad, but then we decided to try and have a good attitude about the whole situation. It was still a very beautiful place. We ended up spending pretty much the rest of the day there wandering around, looking at the other flowers they have, seeing the windmill and learning about how windmills work and why they were so popular in The Netherlands.

I guess the park was started by tulip farmers as a way to show people the different things they could do with the flowers. It is a pretty good idea. They had a bunch of fun photo spots and a large variety of different types of things to see.

Wooden shoes anyone?

Oh you know, just hanging out on a boat will a bunch of flowers

Look what we found! One of the few survivors...

Just envision what this looked like two weeks before. What potential...

This was pretty cool. It was a one-man-band, only without the man. It had some power source and then it played the drums, flutes, and other instruments by itself. One of the employee's job was to stand behind and and switch out the book/music. Make sense? Probably not, but it was cool.

Back of the "music box"

So this post is getting really long. We'll have to do the rest of what we affectionately call our "AmsterDAM Tulip" trip in another post.