Amsterdam Day 3: Dad's visit

Day three of my trip started with packing up all of my stuff and waiting for my dad to come meet me at my hostel. I was really excited to see him after all that time! He had worked hard to move his schedule around to see me, so I told my friends I'd see them in Brussels, and left to hang out with my dad.

We first went to his crew hotel where I'd be staying with him that night to drop off my stuff. It was far from the city center, but it was really nice! Part of the niceness was that he had brought me things from home including the pumpkin bread I had requested from my mom. We dug into that pretty quickly. It tasted like fall at home!

We left the hotel after a bit and made our way back to the city center. My dad had never been to the Anne Frank house, so we decided to go. We ended up standing in line outside in the rain for about a half-hour, but it was worth it. No photos were allowed, so I don't have any, but it was such a moving place to be. You see the rooms where they lived all that time, and at the end you see the actual diary. On a wall they have copies of the diary in all the languages they're published in. It's amazing to see the reality of the story I read when I was twelve.

The house, as one can imagine, as a little depressing. My dad and I were also hungry. We hoped on the tram to go find his favorite french fry place.

Side note: when we left the hotel that morning, my dad asked, "Do you have your camera?" I replied, "Yes." He said, "Good. Maybe I'll make it onto your blog."

So, I took a few candid shots of my dad. Hey look dad, you're famous!

The fries were just what I needed. After devouring them, we got back onto the tram to go to the van Gogh museum. The famous Iamsterdam sign is right by there. If you were wondering, that is the name of a tourism company. They are making a ton of money every time that annoying beer commercial is played in the U.S.!

Dad took a photo of me:

This was the van Gogh museum from the outside.

We went in and looked at the paintings for a while. My dad had never seen a van Gogh in real life before. There were a few famous ones there. Again, no picture-taking was allowed.

My dad wanted to see the sunflower painting. There was one of them there, but it wasn't the one he was thinking of. Oh well. It's van Gogh's fault for painting about sixty of them.

Our final stop of the day was a rib place. We got there right as it was opening for the night because we were both so tired. We shared a giant plate of ribs that were really really good! No BBQ sauce, but it was okay. The ribs were worth it!

Below, you can see a blurry picture of my dad paying the bill in the restaurant.

We made it back to the crew hotel where I spent the rest of the night eating American snacks and browsing the internet. My dad fell asleep accidentally watching TV a couple times. I was about that tired too! I used the lovely huge shower in the hotel bathroom with it's towel-warming rack (like this one):

I said to my dad, "Nice place! There's a towel warming rack in the bathroom!"
"Oh, that's what that thing is!"
He examined it, turned to me and said, "don't let your mother find out those exist."
"Too late. They're all over HGTV."

I went to sleep in my single bed that was actually long enough for me, unlike all the hotel beds I've been in since being in Europe. At 4:40AM, I woke up. I had a 6:30 train to Brussels to catch. My dad came in the room after going downstairs. He had learned that his flight from Amsterdam to Mumbai had been cancelled! He was going to stay in Amsterdam another day, and then just fly back to the states.

We took a cab to the train station where we said good bye. I got on the train and immediately fell asleep.

Seeing my dad definitely made me more homesick. This was the point where I started wishing that my program would hurry up and end so that I could go home to my family (and dog)!