We’re starting to get this sleeping thing figured out. Last night, we slept more like 10 hours. 6-7pm bedtime is normal right? Well, the benefit to it all is we were all able to easily wake up to be to the airport with plenty of time for an 8am flight. Here’s our little plane to Amsterdam.
When we landed in Amsterdam, it alternated between blue skies and raining about every 20 minutes. It made us super nervous for trying to catch a train to the ship. But Kris saved the day. She spotted a Viking person and asked if we could join them on the ride to the ship. Since we had flown to Copenhagen first, we didn’t think they would. They said of course, they had plenty of room. I told Kris I would buy her dinner and a drink on the cruise because of it, but for some reason she wasn’t that impressed...
We didn’t do a lot in Amsterdam, except we did see the National Holocaust Museum and Memorial. The courtyard here was where 600 Dutch Jewish children were saved by passing them over the wall to people in the resistance. They found ways to get them to safety.
The memorial was behind me in the picture. This was a theater that was treated as a deportation center during the occupation of the Netherlands. A place that would normally seat 800 people for a performance, house over 1200 people during this time. The conditions were terrible and after the war the theater was in ruins. In discussions of what to do with it, the people of Amsterdam said that they could not laugh again in such a place. They turned it into a memorial. If you looked out the window behind me, you see the ruins of theater from the perspective of what used to be the balcony.
The museums had a mixture of artifacts kept safe by friends and family of Jewish people who were deported and artifacts from the old theater (or playbills and costumes).
For some reason we didn’t get a picture of the ship from the outside yet. We’ll get one later for another post. But for now here is a view of Amsterdam from the window in our state room.
Every night there is a scheduled cocktail hour and dinner at 7:15. We heard if you are even 15 minutes late for dinner, they will not seat you. Luckily, there is a lighter fare option that they will still feed you. Those who took a nap and slept to long were sentenced to fresh shellfish and other fish. Bummer for them... but we made it to dinner in time and were not disappointed. Wine and delicious food galore.
At cocktail hour, they gave us a welcome speech with what to expect in the following days. They said that they didn’t want to just meet our expectations, they wanted to exceed them. MO and Kris had very different reactions to it. MO slightly rolled his eyes and Kris’ eyes welled up with tears (hence why she turned away from my picture). In MO’s defense, this was the latest we had made him stay awake for days. Most of us were awake until 9:30pm... Good job us!
Tomorrow, on to Kinderdijk for a UNESCO world heritage site tour of windmills.
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