My friends and I headed to Amsterdam, Netherlands for the weekend, and although it didn’t go exactly as planned, I still loved Amsterdam.

Very unfortunately, one of my friends and I got sick the night we left for Amsterdam, so we weren’t feeling the best but still wanted to make the most of it and go. We all arrived in Amsterdam at around midnight, and headed straight to the hotel and went to bed so that we were feeling better by the morning.

The next morning, we allowed ourselves to sleep in a little and woke up at noon. We headed straight to the Heineken experience where we did a full tour of Heineken. We took the tram from our hotel and I have never taken a tram before which was cool. There were so many tiny cars that we all thought were hilarious because I didn’t realize how common these tiny cars were.

The Heineken tour was a lot of fun and it was so interesting to learn about how the beer is brewed and the history of the Heineken family and the business. We went through all of the different rooms. Some were about the history and background, and others were interactive, and we also were given 2 beers.

After the Heineken experience was over, we left and realized that it started snowing hard. It was freezing cold and windy and there was so much snow it seemed like a blizzard. We were starving because we did not eat any breakfast, so we decided to find a lunch place nearby. We trekked through the snowy streets as fast as we could and finally found a place. We found a cute sit down café nearby and ordered coffees and matcha, and sandwiches.

After eating lunch, we decided that we needed to seek warmth so we did some shopping. We went into some cute stores, and then finally went into Cartier where my best friend Kate and I got matching Cartier rings as early birthday presents. We were so excited because we have been talking about getting those rings since we were in middle school and we finally did it because of how good the conversion rate was. We sat there for awhile and they served us champagne as a toast for buying our rings.

Once we finished shopping, we realized it was probably best to head back to the hotel so that we could get ready for dinner. We arrived back at the hotel and showered and got ready before Ubering to an Italian restaurant. I ordered pizza and pasta and it was delicious. The restaurant happened to be in the red light district, which was a very interesting place to say the least. After we finished eating we decided to meet up with a few other friends from our program and walk around. Walking around the red light district was definitely one of the weirdest experiences I have had. I have never in my life been to place like that before, and I was shocked at what I was seeing.

After walking around for a while, we were exhausted and decided that we needed to get some rest considering we weren’t feeling well. We got back to the hotel and got ready for bed. The next morning was where our trip started to go down hill. We woke up very late, at around noon, and felt horrible. One of our friends was throwing up with a stomach infection and I had a fever. Sadly we had no choice but to stay in the hotel for almost the entire day while our friends went into the city and got lunch and walked around. At around 6pm, we attempted to rally ourselves and we tried our best to make the most of it and meet our friends downtown. We walked around for a bit and it felt nice to get some fresh air. We sat down for dinner at a sushi restaurant in the red light district and then got churros and crepes for dessert.

The two of us said our goodbyes to the rest of our friends and went back to the hotel since we still weren’t feeling well. We packed our bags and went straight to bed since we had a 7AM flight in the morning. When we woke up, we checked out of our hotel and headed straight to the airport. I was very sad that I didn’t get to see as much of Amsterdam as I wanted to. There were so many more things I wanted to experience when I was there that unfortunately I wasn’t well enough to do. There’s always next time!