The week after my spring break, a friend from Penn State came to visit me on PSU’s spring break. He’s of German decent, and really wanted to visit Germany (a country where, I’ll be honest, I never had any interest in going to) so I decided to plan a day in Munich and then two days in Amsterdam (a place I did want to visit) for his stay.

Now, this friend of mine, he’s very into the German part of his heritage. He’s actually on the board for German club at PSU, and is pretty good at speaking the language. He gets super excited to speak to any native German speakers back home because he gets to practice. So, imagine his reaction when we arrive in Munich and realize that they speak a much, much different dialect of German that what he had learned. (He had known it was slightly different, but not this much!) It’s a good thing he could read German, because if not, we would have been lost getting around.

In Munich, we went to the market where we tried a little bit of everything you’d think would be involved in typical German food. My friend spent a bit of time, going around to all the vendors and speaking to them. Afterwards, we walked to the Deutsches Museum, a museum all about science and technology. For my engineering major friend, this was great. For me, well…Let’s just say the signs were all in English as well, but the subjects they were about might as well have been in German, for all it meant to me.

One of the more interesting parts of Munich, though, was dinnertime that night. We both enjoy Vietnamese food and decided to try out a Vietnamese place near the hotel. However, it turned out that our waitress didn’t speak a single bit of English-only German and Vietnamese. So, between the two of us, we managed to order what we wanted successfully. He was used to a different dialect, and my Vietnamese is just altogether shoddy, so it was a challenge for sure, but we made it.

After Munich, we head over to Amsterdam for the next two days. It was absolutely gorgeous. We toured the Anne Frank Haus, as well as the Museumplein and the Red Light District during our stay. I thought it was particularly interesting to see how a city so beautiful and child friendly suddenly could be so…child unfriendly, so say the least, right after you turn a corner into the Red Light District. One moment, I’m visiting Anne Frank’s house and seeing Van Gogh’s famous works, the next moment, a twenty minute walk away, there are prostitutes in windows in front of me. Definitely very strange, how the two sides of Amsterdam can exist so close to each other!

So, in all, I would definitely recommend Amsterdam to anyone who’s interested. It’s the most gorgeous non Italian city I’ve ever been to-so gorgeous, I’m actually visiting again in two weeks when my mom visits me!