If you had told me a few months ago that I would enjoy climbing up a narrow brick tower with rickety wooden stairs and ladders, I would have said something like “I know I’m the one with rusty old VW bus… but you’re crazy!” But sure enough, today we climbed up the Westerkerk bell tower – and it was awesome!
We have been saying that we are going to climb this thing since we got here, but between working and wandering the streets of this crazy city, we just hadn’t gotten around to experiencing Westerkerk. So today we paid our €7.50 and started our ascent. 
Westerkerk is the tallest church tower in Amsterdam, and was built by the Protestants in the mid 1600’s. The church itself has a very stark interior, especially compared to some of the other grand Catholic cathedrals I’ve seen. The tower contains the famous bells that can be heard ringing various melodies and chimes throughout the day.
Going into the church is free, but they make you pay a little cash and go in a tour group of 6 to climb the tower. Noelle thought the guide was cute… so that was a good start. The tour was pretty short and simple – he explained a little history of the tower as we stopped on each floor to rest. The view from the top was amazing!
Heading back down those ladders and stairs was a bit of a challenge, but honestly, after 3 weeks of running up and down the 4 flights of stairs at our apartment, we took these in stride – Success!
We also wandered around the inside of the church. They say Rembrandt is buried somewhere – I didn’t notice at first, but the entire floor of this place is actually just a bunch of stone graves. I’m sure they don’t mind the hundreds of people tramping over their face all day long!
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So the tower was awesome, the church was cool, and even the area around Westerkerk is nice. They’ve got a herring stand, a stand selling yummy frites, usually someone out playing some music. There’s also the ever present line to get into the Anne Frank house stretching around the block (if you can’t tell already, lines are not my thing (except at D-world, the happiest place on Earth.)) A great church in a great neighborhood!
On a side note, Noelle and I celebrated our six year anniversary this weekend – so of course we found the highest rated Mexican restaurant in town and went straight there. Los Pilones is actually a Mexican restaurant run by Mexican ex-pats, as opposed to a “Mexican” restaurant run by crazy Europeans who think they can cook but they can’t. It was cool, the cerveza was cold, the margarita’s were tasty, and the fish tacos were awesome!
In the 4 weeks or so that we’ve been in Amsterdam, we’ve been to a bunch of places and seen a lot of cool stuff. We’ve also spent a lot of time sitting around working in front of our computer screens – I guess trying to make enough passive income to sustain global travel while simultaneously paying someone to patch holes in an old VW bus takes a lot of work… who knew!
