For the first time since my arrival in Koblenz, I have gone on a trip outside Germany! Last weekend I visited my friend who is studying in Leiden, a cute little city in Holland (about half an hour from Amsterdam). I have to admit, I knew very little about the Netherlands prior to traveling there, so I learned a lot while visiting. Here are some of my favorite things from my trip to Holland:

Pancakes and Stroopwafel: First of all, stroopwafel is fantastic. I don’t know how I had never heard about it before. It’s basically two very thin waffles with a caramel filling in the middle, and it’s best fresh and hot at the morning markets. I brought some home and am trying not to eat them all at once! Pancakes are also really different in the Netherlands. They’re thinner and often topped with things other than syrup, kind of like a pizza. The best I can say is that they’re sort of like crêpes but that’s not entirely right either. I had one for dinner with ham, bacon, and cheese, but you can also get it with fruit or desert toppings.

All the bicycles! Why didn’t anyone warn me about the bicycles in the Netherlands?! People are crazy about them—walking through Amsterdam especially was like an obstacle course of avoiding speeding bicyclists, dodging trams, and outrunning my fellow pedestrians. There are bicycles everywhere, and even on the sidewalk the chances of getting run over by one are good if you don’t watch out. The Dutch are also expert bicyclists and have all sort of neat attachments for children, groceries, boyfriends or girlfriends who want to ride on the back, and even dogs. And the bicycle parking garages! Imagine the ones we have in the States for cars, except it is full to capacity of bicycles. Hey, at least it’s healthy.

Architecture and Canals: Apparently most of the Netherlands is built on marshland. To combat this, the Dutch built canals through their cities and farms so that they could still live there without getting flooded all the time. As a result, both Leiden and Amsterdam (the two cities I visited) have tons of canals, and they’re very beautiful, especially with all the old boats at the docks. This also had an impact on Dutch architecture. Buildings tilt out, to the left, to the right, and windows sometimes aren’t quite straight. The foundations just aren’t good enough in some places to keep the houses straight, and instead of fixing the foundation, the Dutch just decided everything was going to be ok since the neighboring houses would hold theirs up. Of course they’re right, but it makes some rows of houses look like something out of Harry Potter held together only by magic. Additionally, some of the houses in Leiden reflect their Calvinist history because their owners weren’t allowed to display their wealth openly, but found more “discreet” ways to let the world know they had money. One was to have very thin lines of mortar between the bricks (the less mortar, the more money the family had). Clever! Oh, and they definitely have windmills there; some work, others are museums or are simply decorative, but they are all beautiful.

Van Gogh Museum: This museum in Amsterdam has the largest collection of Van Gogh paintings in the world, and I was so excited to see them! I absolutely love museums, and ones that display original art in particular. Seventy-five pieces were on display, including The Bedroom, The Potato Eaters, and Sunflowers, my personal favorite. Although I was familiar with Van Gogh’s use of color, I had never before seen an original piece and had no idea how incredible the texture is on his paintings. If you are ever in Amsterdam, I highly recommend visiting.

It was so much fun to experience yet another culture and other cities in Europe! It’s so strange to me how different all these countries and cities are, when compared to the U.S. they are relatively close together. I also enjoyed seeing a friend from St. Edward’s again, and speaking English more than I have since I left Texas was a welcome relief for my brain.