Travel With Phie

We wanted to let the rest the crew get some rest, so we met in the lobby at 10:30am again. Our plan today was to go to the town of Gouda. We left the lobby and headed towards the train station. Carly was leading so we took the scenic route, which lead us to a delicious pastry shop where we stopped and all got a little croissants.

Once we got our little pastry, we continued on our way to the train station. We saw some cute little streets and a couple red lighted windows (although it was 11am…). A while later we arrived at the train station, bought our tickets and hopped right on the train.

On the train we chatted and checked out a blog post which had ideas of things to do in Gouda. We found a place for fondue and a few other options.

We hopped off the train in Gouda with a dream and a rain coat. Welcome to the land of famous cheese… WOAHH.. are we gonna fit in? Haha!

Once we got to Gouda, we headed to a coffee shop. We all ordered different coffees and going off of my red velvet latte from yesterday, I decided to get a chocolate chip cookie latte macchiato. It was not very good, but boy did it look amazing! We sat and drank our drinks for a while because it was raining outside.

Once we finished (or pretended to finish most of our coffees) we carried on our way down the street of stores. This was the first time of the trip and probably the only time of the trip that we went / will go shopping. We popped into a few stores, the men went and bought some t-shirts and the females went and bought some ONLY jeans.

We then stopped for lunch to get some cheese fondue. It was a place near the center square. We sat down and ordered 7 servings of cheese fondue and every bite was amazing! After we eat we continued on our way around the city, while, of course, taking a lot of photos.

We continued to walk and then stopped in the famous Stroop Waffle shop to get some Stroop waffles to take home as well as eat on the rest of the trip.

We then tried to go to the cheese museum but it was closed, so made our way to the cheese experience. We decided this was probably not worth it. We then made our way back to the train station to train back to Amsterdam. This train was roughly 50 minutes and most of us slept/closed our eyes for the journey.

Once we arrived in Amsterdam, we headed back to the hotel to change for the remainder of the night. The only agenda item was to go and see the Ann Frank house and find a place for dinner. We found the house and took a couple photo before heading into the city to find dinner. We tried a couple of places, but were unable to find something until we stumbled into the most perfect hole-in -the-wall restaurant “Santi & Santiago.”

The place seemed to be family owned and our waiter was the best person ever. We were admiring the plates and he took the time to show us pictures of where he got them as well as tell us stories from the town. We also later found out that he built the table we were eating on which was a beautiful wood table. The food itself was amazing as well and all hand-made. Overall, for me it was the best meal of the trip thus far.

After dinner we, of course, made our way back to the same bar to catch the end of the soccer game. We had a beer or two before we continued on our way back to the hotel and off to bed.

Goodnight!