Today another technological oops. Usually I'm so good with these things.  Couldn't be because I left right after school for the airport after making sure everything was set up for the sub for the day I was missing, could it? The blunder is not a biggie but just aggravating. I bought a fancy shmancy keyboard to connect my ipad to and didn't realize the cord that came with it was for charging the keyboard. Don't know how I thought it was going to keep working. Guess I thought it took power from the iPad? (Hope I can find it at home...) Oh well.  Hopefully it doesn't impact the blogging but if the pictures look a little wonky, that's why.

So day 2 in Amsterdam.  We woke up to a cool (I like that part) and rainy day. We headed to the Van Gogh museum which is practically across the street. We zoomed ahead thanks to museum passes. We got our audio guide and were off- with the many many many other people getting out of the rain.  It was a great museum.  I was unfamiliar with his earlier works and still life paintings. I was more familiar with his self portraits, Iris painting, sunflowers and the bedroom.  The museum had a FANTASTIC collection from all the different stages of his development as an artist. I do like his later works with the multiple long, quick strokes the best. The audio guide said he did 65 self portraits to practice his techniques. Holy moly!  Towards the end of his life he was doing a painting a day. Quite sad that his life ended so early. After a couple of hours, my brain was on overload so we headed to the gift shop.  I got a great book that tells his life story in comic book form (let me know if you'd like to take a look). After we dropped our stuff off at the hotel we headed by tram to a pedestrian  shopping walkway we were at yesterday. We stopped at the Swatch store so I could get batteries for watches (sister-yours is in working order!) I didn't have them yesterday, so I'm glad we were able to go back. I've had them in my suitcase in a cute bag that says "heal me". And I'm glad we found the shop and now they're healed : ) I had a great lunch -tomato soup and toasted cheese (perfect for that kind of day).  Our last stop of the day was the Amsterdam museum. It was really cool. Your brochure had a QR symbol to scan when you got to the screens so that it knew what language to play the short film in. The films were only a minute or two long and there were several throughout the museum.  I learned tons of things. I had no idea that the city was so far below sea level, that the orange I see everywhere is because of the house of orange (family name) and so many more things. It was a great way to end the day and our stay in Amsterdam.

Tonight the rain canceled our canal dinner boat ride that served pizza and Ben & Jerry's (does that sound like me or what??). It was going to be an early bday dinner. Can't control the skies though, so we went to an Italian place instead. We'll add the canal boat ride to the list of reasons to come back!

Some of my favorites from the museum.....

They had this one on the wall to take pictures by since you weren't allowed to take them inside. 

From the Amsterdam museum: picture of QR reader and screen, illustrations showing sea level and Amsterdam's level, the pilings used, a bus stop from the Jewish Quarter that has never been used again since WWII, a wall with the number of Jewish people who died and a statue of  David and Goliath.