Amsterdam

The schedule is getting a lot tighter as the trip comes to a close, so I am not going to have time to put any pictures in these updates. Sorry if the explanations seem short, I am really crunched for time, I am staying up late to do these as it is, so just email me if you want more specifics, but you can also just wait until I get back home.
We went to Amsterdam yesterday. We arrived at Amsterdam Centraal and we began our tour with Joost (a teacher from Dalton Voorburg) guiding us. We first gradually made our way to the Anne Frank Huis, with Joost giving us the historical background of many things we saw along the way. The Anne Frank Huis was very interesting, but not very time consuming so we were finished there in about 45 minutes.
We then found a central location to make a meeting place, then split up into groups to go shop and have lunch. Daniel, Enrique, and I went to a pannenkoeken place for lunch. We shopped a while, although most of the tourist stores were pretty much the same thing, a bunch of T-shirts saying something about the sex or drugs in Amsterdam. I got a pretty nice shirt though, it just has a Dutch license plate and it says Amsterdam on it. I wish they had more tourist-type shops in the other cities, because I would much rather have gotten shirts for Rotterdam and Den Haag. About the typical stuff one things of when they think of Amsterdam, I'm not going to even discuss because I really don't like it that such a nice city has received such a bad rap because what the tourists have done. Even though I agree with the decriminalization and everything, I don't like the stereotype that has been placed upon the Netherlands because of it. But as Joost told us, "what the tourists want, they get" Oh well...
Next, we went to the Amsterdam Dungeon. This was pretty fun, it is sort of a haunted house type place but it is full of actors and it gives you knowledge of the bad times of Amsterdam.
For the final part of the day, we went on a canal boat tour of Amsterdam. This was my favorite part, because I, and most of us, were pretty tired. It was a nice way to relax and see a ton of the city. After we went to a pancake restaurant (I've had 5 pancakes during the trip at this point) and had a nice meal.