After an almost 24 hour travel day and minimal sleep for most (I got five hours though!) we arrived in Amsterdam bright and early ready to take on our first full day. To start off our morning we trekked through customs, a train, and the metro to arrive at our hotel and drop off our bags. Although everyone was sleepy and seemed ready to hit the hay we all stayed determined to travel toward the center of Amsterdam. When we finally arrived in the cities center we were tasked with a fault in our stars themed scavenger hunt. This proved to be very difficult for my group as we were only able to figure out 2 of the 7 clues. Ultimately ending up with our group quiting and instead rerouting to finding The Fault in Our Stars bench from the movie. By doing this we were able to see various beautiful canals and streets as we explored the different parts of the city. It was interesting to see how the canals are used in many different ways from tourism, to living, to delivering goods. Although my favorite canal boat I saw was a boat full of tulips in what I assume could be transporting them to different flower shops in the city!

After swiftly breaking for lunch with a quick lunch from the local market Albert Hejin we made our way towards the station RAI to catch a bus to the famous Keukenhof gardens. When we arrived at the gardens I quickly became enthralled by the various types of tulips displayed before us. At these gardens I was able to see almost 800 varieties of tulips in every different color. Although I was slightly dissapointed as we came on the last day in season so many of the tulips were dead and the gardens lacked the usual cascading fields of tulips. It was interesting to see which tulips survived, I quickly learned after a bit of research that darker colored tulips tended to survive the season longer as they had less effect on the sun.

Following our very chaotic exploration to the gardens (which we managed all by ourselves 40 minutes outside of Amsterdam) we headed back to the hotel to rest before dinner. For dinner we had a traditional dutch meal of mashed potatoes and sausage which was very filling and I liked suprisingly way more than I thought I would. It was also very nice to finally get a moment of downtime to sit and eat a meal with everybody where we discussed our day and continued to rave about how interesting this city is. To end off our day on a high note Dr. Kutzmann bought us all ice cream! I can’t wait to continue exploring the city and learning more about Amsterdam.