Amsterdam

so.
things at the kita are still going really well. the kids are super cute, and despite some staffchanges and some minor parent drama, it's fascinating. and i get so many hugs!
the weekend before last we went to amsterdam. we had planned to meet steph and her mom there for awhile, but i sort of forgot about it until the last minute with all the trial stuff and general lifebusiness. anyway, we ended up flying, because it turned out that flights and traintickets were approximately the same price when you book the trip a month or so in advance. it was nice to fly; the train trip is around six hours, and the flight is less than two, which is buena-buena when you only have a three day weekend. aside from phil taking the wrong bus to meet me at the airport & therefore being around 45 minutes late, the flight was uneventful. we got to amsterdam in the evening, walked around a little bit, and went to check in to our hotel, which ended up being super far from the center of the city: we took one of the metro lines (amsterdam only has a few metro lines, and they mostly go from the center of the city to the suburbs. ahoy, light rail!) to the last stop and then walked along the highway through lots of what smelled like cowfields, past a horse-riding-farm, and into a pretty parking lot with our (nautical-themed) "riverside" hotel. it was actually kind of nice. it was less expensive then staying in a hostel in town, and i thought it might be fun to be able to leave our stuff in our room without lockers and to come in late without worrying about waking up other hostelpeople. or being woken up by hostelpeople.
i did some preliminary research (in the internet!) before we left, because although we both like openended cityexploring, we spent a lot of our completely unresearched and unplanned trip to london wondering what exactly we were looking at.
we got up super early to go to the anne frank house. i really wanted to see it, and i got tickets online ahead of time to be extraorganized. i read that it was better to go in the early morning or right before closing to avoid millions of schoolchildren (there were still quite a lot of schoolchildren) so we went when it opened (around ninethirtyish). it was eerie being in the actual rooms that anne frank & family hid in. i cannot imagine staying quiet inside rooms that tiny all day everyday for years. it seems impossible. it made the entire story much more unavoidably real, and it had a very different feel from places like dachau or museums.
we did a lot of walking arould the city, and we went to see a bunch of neat places, like the rijksmuseum, which is the national art museum (lots of ship art and rembrants).
while we were walking around, we met a lovely lady named elsa who was german, and we ended up having tea with her in a cafe while we talked about germany and all sorts of things (in german!). she was very nice, and we hope to keep in touch.
the buildings in amsterdam are all very interesting- very beautiful and old. they all lean slightly to one side or the other; i suppose this is due to the fact that amsterdam is built on reclaimed land. also, all of the houses have excellent hooks on the front for hoisting things in and out of the windows. this city is wellknown for having Very Narrow Staircases. they are also very steep, and dangerousfeeling. the canals and scenery were lovely, and all the people we met spoke absolutely flawless english- even the man cleaning the train at night! how incredible.
we met stephanie and her mom and some of her mom's friends, who were all very nice, and we ate at a cute restaurant, got to hang out a lot, although unfortunately steph got a little bit very sick and we had to have a crazy taxi adventure to get her back to her hotel and then up the stairs.
all in all, it was a very beautiful city, and i cannot wait to return.