New Years Eve

On New Years Eve day, we met up with the cousins again at the Rijksmuseum (pronounced Rike museum). The building itself is a like a work of art! It was founded in 1808, but just 2 years ago they finished a 10 year and €375 million renovation and it's amazing! Connor and I bought a card for €60 that lets us into 45 museums for free and thank God we did because it's going to take a lot of visits to be able to see everything there is to see there. I completely understand why this is the most visited place in Amsterdam! Because I don't want to be super boring and because I know nothing about art, I'll only post a few pictures.

Yes, we did the typical touristy pose in front of the I Amsterdam sign, but it was super busy so this was the closest we got. And yes I'm wearing my glasses because someone made me stay up until 4:30 in the morning watching Kobe's last game against the Celtics...

This is one of Van Gogh's famous self portraits that he did in 1887.  Seeing it in person reminded me of the first NFL game I went to when I was younger; you watch the game on TV and the stadium looks huge and the players are giant and Tom Brady is God-like and then you see it in person and the field is the exact same size as the high school field  and the players are just normal people (except Tom because he's gorgeous). Seeing this in person, it looked so small, just a regular size canvas. But the portrait being small didn't detract from the experience; on the contrary it kind of humanized Van Gogh for me. 

Rembrandt's The Night Watch, or De Nachtwacht was the complete opposite; it was huge!! The canvas took up the entire wall! And supposedly in 1715 they cut off 20% of it to help make it fit better. I can't imagine it being any bigger! I also found myself getting distracted trying to imagine how someone would paint something of this magnitude. You'd have to use a ladder or something, but I kept thinking how frustrating it would be if you stepped back and noticed something you wanted to change in the top corner and how annoying it would be to have to get the ladder back out and have to go fix it.

From there we went to another museum, Our Lord in the Attic, or Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder, which is a 17th century canal house, turned house church. In the 1600s, it was illegal for Catholics to worship publicly so clandestine churches like this popped up in a few places. So when I first heard about this I was thinking yeah okay whatever people got together and prayed in some old attic why is this a museum? No Lauren you're wrong! This place was so cool! The tour starts off by going around the well preserved 17th century house and then leads to the attic. It was a self guided audio tour where they gave this hand held thing that looked kinda like a cell phone and when you walked into different rooms, you held it up to displays in each and then commentary would start playing about what you were seeing.

If you look in the back of the kitchen you can see Danny and he's modeling the audio tour gadget thingy!

The box beds where people slept are tiny! A Connor for scale

View from inside. It looked just like any other house on the street so you would never know the church was there. 

Nativity 

view from above the church

*note the fire extinguisher is not part of the original church,but please don't let it extinguish your impression of complete immersion into the 17th century

The back of the church and the organ from below

The altar

Confessional (I think kneeling on those hard piece of wood would be penance enough!)

Baptismal font (I think their babies were smaller back then)

Priest's vestments

they made us wear these booties to protect the floors

Everything in Amsterdam has been amazing so far that I was starting to think it was too good to be true. Until New Years Eve...Amsterdam I've found your flaw! Fireworks are illegal in the Netherlands expect for the days leading up to NYE and then there aren't any laws about lighting them. It was fun at first seeing the fireworks going off over the canals the nights leading up to it, but then it got dangerous. People will light them off in the middle of a crowded street or inside buildings! People dropped fire crackers from second story windows right on the sidewalk where we were walking. The night club we went to had lit sparklers coming out of champagne bottles in the middle of the dance floor and I'm shocked no one's hair caught on fire! We still had a lot of fun though, especially since we didn't die! Here's a selfie for proof...

We hope everyone at home is having a great 2016 so far! Happy New Year! we love and miss you all!