Day 14b:

Day: 14b

Countries: 4               Cities: 7

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Steps through Amsterdam…

Day 14b

Saturday 2 January 2016

But there's still so much left that we did to write about…

(And it doesn’t seem quite right to so abruptly shift from…. So we’ll continue our steps through Amsterdam on a different page, in a different post.  Day 14, part two…)

After walking through the Anne Frank House, which took two hours that didn't feel like two hours, we went to the Pancake Bakery and had these delicious and huge pancakes. It was delicious. So filling. Don't even want to think about the calories that filled me up today. Those pancakes did keep us pretty well filled for pretty much the entire day.

After second breakfast, we walked around, saw the Tulip Museum, walked in and out of a few cheese shops that offered free samples. Across the canals. Past many a bicycle. Up and down these cute little streets lined with cute little narrow houses that I just want to move into today—and decorate with all of the cute little decoratives from all of the funky, cute, neat little homeware stores that lined the other side of the streets we walked...

We meandered around most of the day, walking here and there and everywhere, from one spot on our Tripomatic app map to the next. Walked briefly through the red light district which was uncomfortable and sad. Hard to see women actually in windows like that, striking up business deals, and people walking through there for whom this was not just a tourist stop to check off on the map. How? A different kind of awful.

But otherwise most everything we saw was really—just cool, neat, charming, nice. All these cool little shops and cute little houses, and neat little rivers, and nice little restaurants, and cozy little coffee places, and delicious little bakeries. (okay, so they weren’t all necessary “little” as in small, but taking advantage of writer’s license and for the sake of parallelism and figurative language and imagery and all that jazz, let’s just throw that adjective into the mix half a dozen times or so… anyway.). 

Nary a place we wouldn't have wanted to go.

Other stops on our tour included Dam Square, the National Monument, Droog Design, various cheese stores and other (“little”) hipster/unique/small local shops, Waterloo Flea Market Square, this tiny 1647 floating house boat restaurant, the Rembrandt Museum (well, at least its gift shop), across the bridge to Rembrandt Square and the Flower Market (tulips galore) and the canal tours ticket office and more cheese stores and Beginhof, the cutest little medieval square ever to walk through…

By then we were ready to sit for a bit so we went to Brix Food and Cafe. Cool atmosphere.  A nice little find. After, we were ready to head over to the canal cruise. We got there and waited in line for about an hour before boarding a little boat for 20 euro that took us calmly and peacefully through the maze of canals, past all these light installations about friendship that were created as part of the light festival. It was pretty cool. My favorites were this one where it looked like a man running then jumping over the bridge, one with colored rope strung all along the river connecting the people in a story, and the last one which was two people rowing with less than 40 lights moving in just the right way so that your mind filled in the rest. It took the guy 8 years to figure out the technology for it. It was pretty neat.

After that we stepped back into the rainy cold, coldest it's been all day. And we headed back to this Foodhallen place we’d stumbled upon the night before (go if you're ever in Amsterdam). And we thought about food but really weren't hungry for it. So then just walked back… And had chocolate for dinner. And got caught up here. And now need to catch back up with sleep. So tired. Good night from the lovely, lovely city of Amsterdam. :) 

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